GENEVA, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Switzerland not only is a major global banking center, but also has one of the world's highest concentrations of philanthropic foundations, a sector showing signs of strong recent growth here, a new report showed Wednesday.
Last year, more than 13,000 grant-making foundations were registered with a combined fortune of almost 100 billion Swiss francs (100 billion U.S. dollars), a 30 percent increase since 2012, according to the SwissFoundations 2017 report.
In 2017, a new grant-making foundation was created in Switzerland almost every day (364), while a total of 187 closed, taking the overall total to 13,129, said the report.
The report's authors say that Switzerland has one of the highest concentrations of such philanthropy bodies in the world at 15.6 foundations for every 10,000 residents.
Half of all new institutions in Switzerland were created in the past 20 years.
The Jacobs Foundation is one of the biggest in Switzerland with 7 billion Swiss francs in assets and it uses its funds for issues such as research into child and youth development
Specialists say Switzerland's stable legal system, rather than any special tax treatment, has helped the development.
"Lots of Swiss inheritance money is being handed down," explained Georg von Schnurbein, director of the Center for Philanthropy Studies at the University of Basel, a co-author of the report, Swissinfo, the website of the national broadcaster reported.
"It's very easy to create a foundation here. There are very liberal regulations, in terms of the purpose, organization, and reporting," he said.
The report said that over the past five years, the total fortune of Swiss grant-making foundations has risen by one-third to 97.4 billion Swiss francs.
Traditional areas of focus remain to be culture and leisure, followed by social services, education and research, health and the environment and around half of the funds go abroad.
Philanthropy study and research opportunities are also growing at Swiss universities.
In September, the University of Geneva launched a Centre for Philanthropy, in collaboration with the Lombard Odier Foundation and the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations, to encourage academic research and teaching.
Lausanne's IMD business school and the University of St Gallen also recently joined this research field.
This year, the Center for Philanthropy Studies at the University of Basel and the Centre for Foundation Law at the University of Zurich are both celebrating their tenth anniversaries. (1 U.S. dollar=1 Swiss Franc)
