The Institutional Environment’s Impacts On Social Donation

The eighteenth CPC National Congress clearly points out that whether the philanthropy can develop healthily and rapidly is an important part in the construction of the harmonious society. In recent years, with the rapid increase in the level of economic development, the gradual improvement of the public’s awareness of charity and the increasing maturity of the charitable organization system, philanthropy has achieved "leaping development". At the same time, the levels of inter-regional charitable donations exhibit severe imbalance.To seek the reasons of the serious inequality and further to explore how to effectively reduce the gap and then to promote the coordinated and comprehensive development of social philanthropy is an important task of this study.To achieve the research purpose, combined with the actual situation of our country’s social donation activities, by collecting the data of China’s 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) from 2001 to 2013, based on resource dependence theory and institutional environment theory, this research is carried out respectively from four areas of economic environment, legal environment, local social trust and government regulation. The mechanism of the institutional environment for social donation levels is empirically examined by using descriptive statistics and regression analysis. Results indicate that the better institutional environments help regions gain more charitable donations; economic and legal environment have significantly positive correlation with social donation level; the economic environment plays a regulatory role in the legal environment, social trust and social donation; government regulation has no significant direct effect, but it can enhance the effect of social trust.