Deep Report on Effective Giving in Asia

Key Takeaway: CEARCH recommends effective giving in Asia as a high impact philanthropic cause.

The full report can be read here.

Introduction: This research project focused on evaluating the cause area of effective giving in Asia; we focused in particular on pledge promotion, though we also examined non-pledge considerations, and we treated high-income East Asian countries (i.e. Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan & South Korea) as the primary targets, given their high donation potential and CEARCH's greater familiarity with the region.

As with all our research projects, this investigation heavily focused on estimating the cause area's cost-effectiveness using quantitative modelling, while gathering evidence through literature reviews, expert interviews, and beneficiary surveys.

Cost-Effectiveness: We model the cost-effectiveness of effective giving in Asia as a function of (a) the value of pledge donations resulting from a 10% pledge by an Asian pledger; (b) the value of more EA talent resulting from a 10% pledge by an Asian pledger; and (c) tractability of pledge promotion in Asia (while applying a number of miscellaneous adjustments to account for non-pledge benefits).

We estimate that effective giving in Asia has a giving multiplier of about 10x GiveWell; it averts the equivalent of 9,750 DALYs per USD 100,000.

Note that this estimate is highly uncertain:

• (a) We have painstakingly tried to incorporate all important variables into the structure of our model, but our analysis may well have excluded some key considerations due to human error.
• (b) We use hard empirical data to ground our line-item estimates whenever possible; unfortunately, relevant data is not always available, and we are sometimes forced to make subjective judgement calls to form key estimates instead.

Note also that GiveWell is generally more rigorous than other cause prioritization & charity evaluation organizations, and a rough rule of thumb we use is that nominal cost-effectiveness estimates from CEARCH and other non-GiveWell evaluators should be discounted to 30% to account for GiveWell's greater rigour (i.e. 10x GiveWell is probably closer to 3x).

The High Value of Effective Giving in Asia: The value of effective giving in Asia is significant. New pledges generate more donations to highly effective charities, while also directing more talent to high-impact careers. Non-pledge benefits are also accrued, given donations from trial pledges, non-pledge public donations, money directed by advising institutional grantmakers in their giving, donations from company pledges, and the moving of non-pledger talent to high-impact careers.

As part of our analysis, we estimated the monetary value of an average GWWC pledge as 146 DALYs averted per pledge (equivalent to USD 20,000 in GiveWell donations). This headline estimate is a function of:

• The cost-effectiveness of the average pledge donation (0.87 GiveWell cost-effectiveness)
• An adjustment for donations unrecorded by GWWC (1.03).
• An adjustment for donations unreported to GWWC (1.03).
• An adjustment for counterfactuality (0.35)
• Expected giving lifespan (16 years)
• An adjustment to account for the fact that early pledgers (whom we have data on) are almost certainly far more ideologically bought into EA than future pledgers (whose giving we are trying to model) (0.8).

We generally expect pledges in Asia to be less (but still) valuable, for a number of reasons: 

• On the negative side, Asian pledgers are less effectiveness-oriented, less affluent, and less generous; there is also the key impediment of the 80:20 rule in Singapore, which requires that 80% of all money raised via public fundraising be used locally.
  
  While it may be controversial to assert systematic differences in generosity or belief in effectiveness amongst different demographics, there is a strong support from the grey literature, from the experts we interviewed, and from our survey of high-impact GHD charities, that Asian donors are generally less interested in cost-effectiveness; similarly, there is empirical data suggesting that people in the target Asian countries give somewhat less relative to GDP per capita compared to people in the average EA country.
   
• However, Asian pledgers are no different in terms of how their annual giving changes over time.
   
• On the positive side, Asian pledgers are counterfactually less likely to do effective giving, and give for a greater number of years.
  
  The lower counterfactual risk is a result of Asian pledgers being less generous and less-effectiveness oriented at baseline, which makes them less likely to be doing effective giving anyway; and indeed, there was virtually unanimous agreement amongst the experts we interviewed that Asians are less likely (relative to Westerners) to give effectively in the absence of a local effective giving organization promoting the GWWC pledge.

Tractability: CEARCH is cautiously optimistic about the tractability of promoting effective giving in Asia, largely off the strength of Charity Box's success in promoting the 1% pledge in China, the comparatively low budgetary costs, and the fact that marginal returns are probably near constant at the funding levels we are interested in (n.b. diminishing marginal returns always applies insofar as the most impactful strategies are exhausted first, but this is balanced out by the fact that having successfully moved money in the past provides credibility when it comes to further moving money in the future).

Talent as a Limiting Factor: The EA community is fairly small in some of our target Asian countries, which will make it hard to recruit the right talent to run local effective giving organizations, though we should also not overstate the problem, insofar as there are existing effective giving initiatives in our target Asian countries (e.g. CEARCH in Singapore, EA Hong Kong & Serica Advisory in Hong Kong, Bloom to an extent in Japan, and Albion East in South Korea).

Conclusion: Overall, CEARCH recommends effective giving in Asia as a high impact philanthropic cause, on the basis of:

• High expected cost-effectiveness
• The significant value of effective giving in Asia
• Moderate-to-good tractability
• Talent being a limiting but not fatal factor

Concretely, we recommend that:

• Charity Entrepreneurship & Giving What We Can incubate new effective giving initiatives in Asia
• Donors fund new & existing effective giving initiatives in Asia; and while we expect EA donors will be more interested in this meta philanthropy opportunity, we also find that some non-EA donors are also interested in impact-oriented, evidence-based philanthropy.