Volunteers for Development: A Test of the Post-Materialist Hypothesis in Britiain, c. 1965-1987

Matthew Braham
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Matthew Braham: Formerly of St. John's College, Oxford

No _030, Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract: Volunteering by young adults for working in Third World countries on development projects emerged in Britain the late 1950s. Three decades later, the country’s largest volunteering sending agency, Voluntary Service Overseas, had sent more than 21,000 people abroad. The most common explanation for the emergence and growth of what is a small social movement is the affluence-value change theory, or Post-Materialism, which predicts that variations in the growth of the movement should vary positively with changes in wealth. This paper tests this prediction with a simple econometric model, and finds that this does not appear to be the case.

Date: 1999-06-05
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