Helen Tice Receives Shiskin Award for Nonprofits, Other Measures

In recognition of her innovative research on the contribution of nonprofits to the economy and for her leadership in other areas, Helen Stone Tice is the 2009 recipient of the Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics.

Tice is the 36th recipient of the award, which is given jointly by NABE, the Washington Statistical Society, and the Business and Economics Section of the American Statistical Association.  She will be recognized at NABE’s 51st Annual Meeting Oct. 10-13 in St. Louis.

Tice is senior research associate at the Center for Civil Society Studies of the Institute of Policy Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  She joined the center in the 1998, after leaving the Bureau of Economic Analysis, where she served from 1977 to 1998.  Earlier she served at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Award Cites U.S., International Contributions

The 2009 Shiskin Award Committee, chaired by NABE member Robert Parker, recognizes Tice for “innovative research in developing improved measures of the activities of nonprofit institutions throughout the world and for leadership in providing users with comprehensive documentation of the methodologies used for the U.S. economic accounts.”

In early July interviews via phone and e-mail, Tice said she became interested in the nonprofit sector nearly 40 years ago when working with Raymond Goldsmith on nonprofit endowments as institutional investors. “I also followed Richard and Nancy Ruggles’ work on micro-macro integration of the household sector, which required a clear separation of NPIs and households in the NIPA personal sector.  My interest in the sector as a whole grew as I explored the institutional context of the expanding list of data sources. So when Lester Salamon offered me the opportunity to join his Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins, it seemed like a very good fit, and I began work on new a project to create an international standard for compiling NPI satellite accounts,” she said.

Tice observed that there has been “a growing appreciation of the size and contribution of the nonprofit sector both here in the United States and internationally.  As evidence of this, 30 countries have started work on NPI satellite accounts or committed to doing so, and countries continue to join the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.”

The contributions of some high-profile charitable organizations, such as the Gates Foundation and the Skoll Foundation, have raised awareness of the importance of the nonprofit sector, Tice said.

“In addition, NPIs are major employers in some areas, such as Baltimore, which has actively encouraged organizations to place their headquarters there.  Academic research in both the United States and other countries has demonstrated the size and importance of the sector.  And, of course, many NPIs are accustomed to advocacy, both for their causes and for the sector,” she said.

Nonprofits Hard Hit By Recession

Not surprisingly, the recession has hit nonprofits hard, especially theaters and the arts, according to a July 6 report from the John Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies.  Some 80 percent of nonprofits surveyed said they are experiencing financial stress from what JHU analysts called a “perfect storm” of declining revenues, increased costs (especially for health care), and fiscal restrictions of state and local governments that support many of them.

The survey was conducted by another of the center’s research programs, the Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project, which found that nonprofits also have generally been able to maintain and in some cases increase the number of people they serve, especially for programs that serve vulnerable populations.

The Shiskin Award also recognizes Tice’s work that has lead to improvements in both U.S. and international economic accounts.   While at the Johns Hopkins Center, she has worked in collaboration with the United Nations Statistics Division, heading a program that resulted in preparation of the Handbook on Non-Profit Institutions in the System of National Accounts. This effort led to improvements in the treatment of the nonprofit sector in the 1993 System of National Accounts (SNA).  Work currently underway at the Center will bring an updated version of the nonprofit measures into alignment with the 2008 System of National Accounts.

Research, Handbooks on Methodologies

The Shiskin Award committee pointed out that Tice’s work on the international accounts, resulting in the Handbook, “was critical because nonprofit institutions (NPIs) have been growing in importance in recent decades and systematic data on NPIs were not available.”  Tice has “engaged in extensive outreach and dissemination of the Handbook, including workshops with international organizations,” the committee noted.

Her work at Johns Hopkins is in partnership with the International Labour Organization, a collaboration that has led to the preparation of the Manual on Measurement of Volunteer Work, plus a JHU working paper on the findings of the research co-authored by Tice.

While at BEA, Tice was involved in research that included the design and implementation of the first updating of methodologies underlying the U.S. accounts in nearly 25 years.  Data users now have publications of these methodologies, including several that Tice co-authored, and which the award committee cited as providing “detail and completeness that was unmatched internationally and greatly enhanced the reputation of BEA throughout the world.”

Asked how she became interested in economics, Tice replied that as a history major at Randolph Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College), she took a course on the history of economic thought.  “I switched to economics because it seemed capable of explaining as well as describing,” she said.

“In graduate school [at Yale], I worked with Raymond Goldsmith and Richard Ruggles and found I had some affinity for this kind of work.  I like figuring things out, whether it’s how to put together a set of numbers that can illuminate a previously dark corner or how to describe the sources and methods underlying a large and complex data system involving a large number of sources,” she said.

Suggests NABE Members Encourage Use of Metadata

When asked how she sees the role of NABE and its members in the U.S. economic data system, Tice suggested that NABE “encourage more use of the metadata—data about data—that are available already. And it can encourage users to go beyond GDP, personal income, and personal consumption expenditures in terms of aggregates available from the national accounts.”

For example, Tice noted that BEA and the Federal Reserve Board in 2007 published Integrated Economic Accounts for the United States, which “are part of an interagency effort to further harmonize the BEA National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) and the Federal Reserve Board Flow of Funds Accounts (FFAs).”[1]  These accounts provide analysts with a tool to look at both real and financial transactions, asset revaluations, and changes in net worth between balance sheets for the major sectors of the United States economy.

“The work of Palumbo and Parker [2] making use of these data, indicates that had such a presentation been available—and widely used—earlier, it might have alerted us to the movement of households from net lenders to net borrowers in recent decades and the sharply increasing housing investment and associated mortgage debt that enabled the current financial crisis, although the high levels of aggregation of both types of financial institutions and types of financial instruments obscured the financial business sector’s growing exposure to real estate and institutional vulnerabilities.” she said. 

As another example, she cited the Commission on the Measurement of Economic and Social Performance, which is international in scope.  “Established by the government of France, the commission is addressing the limits of GDP as the prime indicator of economic performance and socio-economic progress, particularly with regard to sustainable development.  It is likely that there will be pressure to feature additional measures that take account of depreciation and depletion, distribution of income and wealth, and well-being.  It would be good if NABE members supported such initiatives,” she said.

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