Donations for overseas development: evidence from a panel of UK charities

We model the determinants of donations made to UK overseas development charities using panel data on charities’ donation income covering a 25 year period. The paper starts by reviewing relevant theory and previous empirical work on donations to UK charities before outlining a framework in which donations are a function of fundraising, government grants, total household income, inequality in household income, disasters, Official Development Assistance, and unobserved fixed characteristics of charities. Models are estimated by the within groups estimator and also by Generalised Method of Moments (GMM). When using the GMM approach, fundraising and government grants are allowed to be endogenous. Fundraising has a powerful effect. Government grants appear to crowd in rather than crowd out donations. No impact is found from ODA. The hypothesis of a unitary income elasticity for donations cannot be rejected. Results are compared with those for non-development charities.