Estimating the Financial Balance Sheet of Charities in the Netherlands: Method Review and Analysis

Abstract

This thesis develops and evaluates a method, by means of multiple imputation, to estimate the financial balance sheet of charity organisations in the Netherlands using an external database. The goal is to increase the accuracy and reliability of these estimates in the context of national accounts and provide the means to replicate this exercise in the future. The results show an intuitively distributed financial balance sheet for the subgroup of charity organisations. The implemented approach is analysed for robustness and replicability, both of which can be considered to be optimal given the available resources. Although increasingly accurate approaches are available as an alternative to the method described in this research, it is able to provide reliable estimations for future years since neither alternative is currently feasible in the Netherlands.