The paper is aimed at examining the correspondence between the demand‐side and supply‐side determinants of the existence of non‐profit firms.
The case study approach is used to compare the demand‐side and supply‐side determinants for a single non‐profit organization in rural Cameroon.
It is shown that the supply‐side determinants of the examined non‐profit organization, while interrelated with the demand‐side determinants, are not reducible to these.
This finding implies the need to steer a middle course between those theoretical approaches that assume no integration between the demand‐side and supply‐side determinants, and those that assume complete integration between these.
The current non‐profit economics literature, represented by the above approaches, tends to assume away the complex interaction between the demand‐side and supply‐side rationales of non‐profit organization. The contribution of the present paper is to highlight the limitations of this assumption.
