Disclaimer: CEARCH itself does some work related to effective giving in Asia, and there is an inherent risk of bias to this evaluation. Beyond doing our best to remain impartial throughout the research process, we have also explicitly applied a meta discount for bias within our CEA, with the goal of eliminating any bias-driven over-estimation of the cause area's cost-effectiveness.
Key Takeaway: CEARCH recommends effective giving in Asia as a high impact philanthropic cause.
Introduction: CEARCH is a research and grantmaking organization – we try to find and fund highly cost-effective philanthropic ideas. The primary author for this report is Joel Tan, the Managing Director of CEARCH, and the lead researcher and grantmaker for its meta portfolio.
Note that this research investigation has been motivated by two considerations:
- Firstly, CEARCH and our grantmaking partners (e.g. individual members of the Meta Charity Funders) are interested in effective giving, and we have been trying to identify projects with high giving multipliers that are potentially worth funding.
- Secondly, CEARCH has been spending more time this year doing outreach and donor advisory work with Asian philanthropists and foundations, and we want to get a better sense of whether this is an effective use of our time.
Importance: Money is currently a significant bottleneck to impact for many highly cost-effective charities, particularly in the cause areas of global health & development and animal welfare. Hence, many grantmakers and donors are interested in effective giving. Meanwhile, the effective altruism & evidence-based philanthropic community has traditionally been weaker and less influential outside of the US and Europe, even as rising incomes and expanding philanthropy in Asia makes the region an attractive space for effective giving promotion. For example, Asia has more than 1000 billionaires collectively worth almost 5 trillion dollars, and the region as a whole could give more than 700 billion if giving percentages matched that of the US.
Cost-Effectiveness: The cause area is probably highly cost-effective. Projects that work on promoting effective giving in East Asia – particularly, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan or South Korea, through a combination of promoting the Giving What We Can Pledge to the public and doing outreach to HNWIs and institutional grantmakers – have a giving multiplier of about 10x GiveWell. This is driven primarily by two factors:
- The high lifetime value of Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledges, and the tractability of promoting such pledges in Asia being moderately good.
- The significant philanthropic dollars that can be unlocked through successful outreach to HNWI & institutional grantmakers in Asia.
That said, uncertainty here is extremely high, particularly since we are working off limited data, and our estimates could be significantly different from the true cost-effectiveness.
Talent: There are currently some highly capable people, well suited to HNWI outreach, already working on effective giving promotion in East Asia (n.b. beyond CEARCH's own work with Asian philanthropists, there is J.C. working in HK and G.N. in South Korea; note that these are all very new projects). At the same time, taking into account EAs per capita and the number of local EA organizations, Singapore and Hong Kong have fairly large EA communities, while Taiwan, Japan & South Korea have fairly small ones; hence, there will be some target Asian countries where it will be hard to recruit the right talent to run local effective giving organizations, which in turn reduces tractability. This lack of EA talent is probably our major concern about this cause area.
Tractability: Outside of the talent issue, we are cautiously optimistic about tractability given the following considerations.
On the negative side:
- The experts we consulted leaned towards the view that it would be difficult to promote effective giving in Asia.
- There are a number of minor considerations that are net negative on balance (e.g. Singapore being English speaking vs the lack of tax deductibility in Singapore, experts being especially negative on the tractability of effective giving in Japan, the weak EA community in Asia being evidence of intractability, and CE's previous failure to incubate an EG organization in East Asia).
On the positive side:
- There are some high-impact giving opportunities available locally (e.g. the Sentinel Bio-funded Asia Centre for Health Security in Singapore or the CEARCH-recommended & GiveWell-funded RTSL in China), which will make it easier to persuade people to give effectively (since there is less need to overcome the reluctance to give to strangers overseas).
- CEARCH – by virtue of our presence in Singapore and our effective giving work in Asia more generally – is in a position to provide a lot of assistance (in terms of connections and advice) to effective giving organizations operating in East Asia, in a way that we would not be able to for other types of interventions and geographies.
- Most importantly, Charity Box has had outsized success promoting the 1% pledge in mainland China.
Money Moved: Fundamentally, what makes effective giving in Asia so promising is the fact that success will mean moving very large sums of money to effective charities.
- A GWWC pledge is extremely valuable. Taking into account the cost-effectiveness of giving, annual dollars donated, counterfactuals, and expected giving lifespan, and after discounting for various data limitations, CEARCH estimates that in securing a new GWWC pledge is worth the equivalent of donating USD 36,000 to GiveWell . Note that our estimate is significantly higher than GWWC's, a finding largely driven by GWWC modelling a decay in average annual donations and us not doing so. Our modelling choice is informed by our previous regression analysis of historical pledge data, which found that the coefficient of the year of giving variable is not statistically different from zero (i.e. pledgers of any given batch give about the same year after year, with attrition balanced out by increasing giving amongst those who continue giving). There is, of course, substantial uncertainty and we could well be wrong.
In any case, we expect Asian pledgers to give less in equivalent GiveWell dollars. There are a number of different factors driving this, but mostly importantly, Asian donors are (a) less generous (according to available data); and are (b) less effective in their giving (n.b. the literature suggests that Asian donors are less willing to give internationally and are also more trust-based rather than evidence-based in their giving; and experts also lean towards the view that Asian donors are less willing to give in a cost-effective way); both these effects outweigh (c) the improved counterfactuals (n.b. since, as experts unanimously agree, Asians are less likely relative to Westerners to give effectively in the absence of a local EG organization promoting the GWWC pledge).
After making all necessary adjustments to the baseline, we expect the average Asian pledger to donate the equivalent of USD 15,000 to GiveWell over their lifetime.
- East Asia has grown exceedingly wealthy, and philanthropic giving has grown accordingly. Based on CEARCH's internal data, and after adjustments for external validity, we generally expect an effective giving organization working in East Asia to move twice as much money via HNWIs & institutional grantmakers, relative to individual small donors.
Neglectedness: There are no public-facing effective giving organizations operating in any of the five target East Asian countries, and no effective giving organizations at all in Taiwan or Japan. Outside of the target East Asian countries, Asia overall is also significantly neglected, particularly in comparison to Europe and its dense network of national EG organizations. (e.g. the only true national EG organizations in Asia are Charity Box in China and Impactful Giving in India).
Funding: While we cannot speak for Open Philanthropy, nor for the Meta Charity Funders, we expect that – based on the projects they have funded in the past – they should be open to funding projects in this space – conditional, of course, on the track record of organizations and the qualifications of individuals requesting funding.
Conclusion: Overall, our view is that effective giving in Asia is (a) extremely cost-effective. Moreover, this cause looks promising outside of raw cost-effectiveness, given that (b) problems relating to talent are probably outweighed by (c) moderately good expected tractability, and (d) success promising large sums of money moved to effective charities.
CEARCH intends to conduct a final deep research round into this cause area; some lines of inquiry we intend to prioritize include the value of a GWWC pledge & HNWI advisory work in East Asia. Overall, conditional on a positive evaluation, we will (a) recommend to our donor partners that this cause area be funded; and (b) commit more of our own time to outreach and donor advisory work with Asian philanthropists and foundations.
Thanks for this excellent post @Joel Tan🔸. As you'd expect (!) I agree with your assertions here, and they form the basis for my own personal efforts in South Korea, and - targeting government and HNWI clients - with Albion East.
I also share your uncertainty regarding the long term outcomes of this work. There is certainly huge potential, and individual examples of success, but a chronic shortage of EA-aligned actors in this space, and - to my mind - a critical gap in terms of leadership and strategic coordination of these efforts in Asia (though CEARCH of course does an excellent job in evidencing opportunities).
I'm keen to explore appetite for some form of low-burden steering group for likeminded organisations and individuals to coordinate their efforts and share experience and good practice. Are others be interested, and/or aware of examples of this approach working effectively elsewhere?
Keep up the excellent work Joel!
Let's discuss this at length!