This article originally appeared on PhilanTopic, a Foundation Center blog, on 29 April 2014. The original article can be found here.

News that Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, co-founders of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, have created philanthropic trusts worth as much as $3 billion is another reminder that wealth creation begets philanthropy as surely as May flowers follow April showers. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of Globalization 3.0, that’s as true in emerging market countries as it is in the United States, with its well-established tradition of individual and institutional philanthropy.

Earlier this month, PND caught up with Joan Spero, former president of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the author of a new report that looks at philanthropy in the BRIC countries, to get her take on the spread of Western-style philanthropy to other parts of the globe. Written and researched in collaboration with WINGS (Worldwide Initiative for Grantmaker Support), a global network of grantmaker associations and philanthropic support organizations, the report, Charity and Philanthropy in Russia, China, India, and Brazil (26 pages, PDF), identifies the cultural, economic, social, and political forces that are shaping giving in the BRICs and examines the growth of the philanthropic sector in each of the four countries.

Philanthropy News Digest: What was your aim in researching and writing the report?

Joan Spero: The report is an outgrowth of my study, The Global Role of U.S. Foundations (56 pages, PDF), published by the Foundation Center in 2010. That report, which documented and analyzed the growth of international giving by American foundations, led to my interest in the rise and role of philanthropy in emerging market countries. I knew from my research that a number of U.S. foundations have supported the development of philanthropy and civil society outside the United States. I also knew from my research and from the work of the Foundation Center with the China Foundation Center and WINGS that philanthropy was growing in the emerging markets. As someone with a background in international political economy, I wanted to understand the historical, social, political, and economic setting in which this new philanthropy is taking place.

 PND: Tell us a little about the methodology behind the report. What kinds of data were readily available, and how would you characterize the state of philanthropic data collection in the four countries covered by the report?

JS: I began with a survey of the literature on philanthropy in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. I was greatly helped in this literature search by a research assistant whose language skills in Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew complemented my knowledge of English and French. From that research, I concluded I would have to narrow my focus to several key countries. The emergence of the BRICs seemed the best way to do that. These countries have very different histories, cultures, and political systems. At the same time, they all seemed to have the right conditions for the growth of philanthropy: rapid economic development and wealth accumulation along with political and social change.

While there are numerous primary sources on economic development and wealth accumulation, I soon discovered that basic data — not even mentioning comparable data — on philanthropy and civil society simply did not exist. So, I had to be creative about finding primary sources. With help from my research assistant, I searched in a variety of places: counterparts of the Foundation Center in the BRIC countries that were beginning to gather data, albeit sketchy data; studies and surveys by research organizations, including academic institutions and business consulting firms; legal reports; et cetera. In the report, I point out the difficulty of finding accurate, complete, and comparable data. Nevertheless, I felt I was able to unearth enough information to reach the conclusions outlined in the report.