BACKGROUND Like the Czech Republic, Hungary boasts one of the better developed nonprofit sectors in Central and Eastern Europe. The government posture towards the sector generally has been benign during the early 1990s, con- tributing to sustained development of the sector even after the original eu- phoria of the immediate post-1989 period began to subside. In fact, data collected through this project in Hungary over time show both strong eco- nomic growth and the beginning of changes in the composition and rev- enue structure of the Hungarian nonprofit sector between the early and mid-1990s. 1 The work presented here was carried out by a Hungarian research team hosted by the Civitalis Research Association as part of a collaborative inter- national inquiry, the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Pro- ject. 2 It thus offers an opportunity both to examine local Hungarian cir- cumstances and peculiarities and to compare and contrast them to those in other countries both in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere in a systematic way. 3 The present chapter reports on just one set of findings from this project, those relating to the size of the nonprofit sector in Hungary and elsewhere. 305 CHAPTER 15 Hungary István Sebestény, Éva Kuti, Stefan Toepler, and Lester M. Salamon Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector by Lester M. Salamon, Helmut K. Anheier, Regina List, Stefan Toepler, S. Wojciech Sokolowski and Associates. Balti- more, MD: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 1999.