Welfare States at Hard Times

Contemporary Welfare States are affected by the burden of an ‘atavic’ spending. Today concentrated on deleveraging, they have to limit their social spending and this one is risking to be drastically cut in the very next future. Next to the Public Welfare State, a Private One is, as a consequence, playing a crucial role. The Italian Private Welfare State includes foundations of banking origin (IFBs). Foundations of banking origin were created by Saving Banks in 1990s’ in order to separate their credit business from their philanthropy. 89 Foundations of banking origin are today the most relevant not-for-profit grant-makers in Italy. In 2010 they gave more than €1,300 millions to ‘causes’ like culture, research, social assistance, education, public health, charities, etc. In 2011 they targeted the same amount to 24,906 projects. The average amount per project fell slightly to €43,866 (€50,459 in 2010) while the average number of projects supported by each IFB was recorded as 283. We analyze the 2010’s financial performances and contribution ratios of these foundations so that we empirically estimate their 2010’s Welfare Role and we profile two main groups thanks to the k-means clustering and four groups thanks to the Ward’s. Recalling that their grants are mostly targeted to cultural and creative industries, the Ward analysis will also focus on their cultural grant-making. The research gives evidence that Italian ‘good causes’ are surviving thanks to these grant-makers whose ‘contribution ratio’ is more than 60 percent and whose ‘cultural contribution ratio’ is never less than 28 percent.