The staggering size of NGOs, nonprofits and foundations

How big have NGOs become? Big. Really, really big.

The biggest of them, World Vision had an annual budget for 2006 of about $2.1 billion. This is roughly 30 times the annual G.D.P. of some of the smallest countries in the world, such as Nauru for example, which has an estimated population of 13,000. World Vision is quite bigger than Nauru also in terms of staff. It had 23,000 employees in 2006… World Vision financial power easily matches the G.D.P.'s of some small rich countries in Europe…

And their cousins, the nonprofits, are even bigger. The YMCA’s annual income is $5.3 bn, the Red Cross $3.8 bn, Goodwill $3 bn. And then you have the foundations:

The top 50 American foundations had combined assets in 2005 of around $151 billion. Even with the current euro to dollar exchange rate, this was more than the budget of the European Union in the same year (about 106 billion euros, or $148 billion). The total spending of these 50 was around $9 billion in 2005.