ABSTRACT
In the European countries, philanthropy has become (once again) a component of ‘welfare provision’. Private contributions to museums, funding for international help programmes and bequests to medical research are increasingly considered the common property of the recipient non-profit institutions. Limiting our focus to welfare states, we see that philanthropic funds also appear in the goals that form the very heart of the welfare state: health care (for example, hospital sponsorship), education (for example, school sponsorship) and income security (for example, private assistance to the poor or to illegal immigrants, as through churches and foundations).
