The fourth edition of the World Giving Index, puts Greece on the bottom of the giving table when it comes to volunteering, donating money and helping strangers.
According to the survey, Greece only mustered a score of 13 out of a maximum 100. The country's altruistic nature was measured across three categories in the index: helping strangers, direct donations to charity and volunteering personal time.
The report said that in a typical month, 30% of people say they help strangers, 6% donate money to charity and only 4% give up their time for various causes.
Translated into rankings, that puts Greece 126th out of 135 when it comes to assisting people they don't know, 130th out of 135 when it comes to donating money, and last when it comes to volunteering.
The United States is ranked first in this year’s World Giving Index (Table 1), reclaiming a position it previously held in 2011. Its score of 61% is the highest on record.
The United States’ return to the top of the World Giving Index is due mainly to the fact that helping a stranger is more commonplace here than in any other country in the world – when asked, 77% of Americans said they helped somebody they didn’t know, up from 71% in 2011. The United States ranks third globally in terms of volunteering, and 13th in terms of donating money.
Unusually, three countries tie for second place this year: Canada, Myanmar, and New Zealand. Australia, which was the highest-ranked nation in both 2010 and 2012 reports, has dropped to seventh position in the rankings but has retained strong figures for giving.
Other countries featuring in the Top 10 are Ireland (5th), the United Kingdom (6th), the Netherlands (8th), Qatar (9th) and Sri Lanka (10th).
Myanmar, last surveyed in 2006, is the highest ranked new entrant this year in the World Giving Index Top 20. Its joint second place in the World Giving Index is mainly due to an extraordinarily high incidence of donating money – 85%.
Another new entrant, the State of Libya, appears in the Top 20 for quite different reasons. In a typical month, almost three quarters (72%) of all Libyans helped somebody they did not know – the third highest level across all 135 countries surveyed. This echoes a pattern observed in previous World Giving Index reports for countries in a post-conflict phase, such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, to receive high scores on this measure.
Analysis of data covering the five-year period 2008 to 2012 (Table 2) shows that seven countries are included in the equivalent Top 20 that do not appear in the Top 20 for 2012 alone. These are: Denmark, Germany, Liberia, Luxembourg, Sierra Leone, Thailand and Turkmenistan. These countries have strong historical associations with giving, but either were not surveyed in 2012, were displaced by new entrants or were not found to have levels of engagement in 2012 in line with previous years.
Only five of the countries appearing in this Top 20 list are members of the Group of Twenty (G20), this group is made up of 19 of the world’s largest economies plus a representative from the European Union. Americans were more likely to help strangers than any other nationality in 2012, and the country also boasts the third highest number of people who do so.
This list of countries with the highest incidences of helping strangers (Table 3) is markedly different from the list in the 2012 report. Six of the ten countries were not in the Top 20 last year: Costa Rica, Nigeria, Senegal, Syria, the State of Libya, and the United Kingdom.
Libya and Syria’s high ranking may of course reflect the impact of the civil wars they have endured (although Libya could not actually be surveyed in 2011). Senegal’s rise in the rankings is the most remarkable, from 51st to 5th (from 50% to 68%). The United Kingdom is the only European country to be included in this Top 10 list.
China and India, the world’s most populous countries, top the list of countries with the highest number of people helping strangers. The remaining two ‘BRIC’ countries – Brazil and Russia – are also in this year’s Top 10 for helping strangers. Each month however, more people help strangers in China than do so in the three other BRIC countries combined.
Photo: Google
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