The implementation of the United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable
development requires a solid statistical framework that has prompted the National
Institutes of Statistics (NISs) to produce Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
indicators. While nonprofit institutions and social entrepreneurship are increasingly
recognized as important actors supporting the achievement of sustainable development
goals (Salamon et al., 2015), official statistics investigating those actors are rare. Even
in the absence of international regulations as a legal basis for producing social
economy and the third sector-related statistics, the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT)
has been producing official statistics on the core characteristics of NonProfit
Institutions (NPIs) for more than 20 years (definition in S.15; Eurostat, 2013).
The objective of this chapter is to show the state of the art of statistical production on
the non-profit sector and Corporate Social Responsability (CRS) in Italy. With the
objective of enhancing the available information and expanding the perspective of
social economy, the ISTAT permanent census of enterprises has investigated the
corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance, including
corporate social CSR. Undeniably, the integration of data sources, combining survey
results with administrative data, positively contributes to acquiring insight into SDGs
while enhancing measures and statistics on the third sector and social economy, such as
the creation of a satellite account of NPIs (UNSTAT, 2018).
Keywords: Corporate and social responsibility, Non-profit sector accounting, Social economy, Third sector statistics.
