The German Gemeinwirtschaftslehre: Implications for modern nonprofit economics

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Valentinov, Vladislav
• 署名单位: Leibniz Association; Leibniz Institut fur Agrarentwicklung in Transformationsokonomien (IAMO)
• 刊物名称: REGULATION & GOVERNANCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1748-5983
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-5991.2009.01050.x
• 发表日期: 2009
• 页码: 186-195
• 关键词: organizations

摘要

This article examines the way modern nonprofit economics can be informed by the Gemeinwirtschaftslehre, a strand of public and nonprofit economics that was popular in German-speaking countries until the 1980s. Despite its present decline, the Gemeinwirtschaftslehre yields a valuable implication that nonprofit firms address market failure by supplanting the pecuniary entrepreneurial motivation with a nonpecuniary one. In this article, this implication is used to reconsider two central and controversial issues in modern nonprofit economics: the rationale behind the nondistribution constraint in nonprofit firms, and the integration between the market failure and supply-side theories of the nonprofit sector. The article concludes by discussing the emerging prospects for empirical research.