Social Preferences and the Third Sector: Looking for a Microeconomic Foundation of the Local Development Path

The aim of the paper is to endorse the principle, recurrent in non-profit literature, that the third sector is an institution that supports the development process of economic systems. The third sector is considered as an institution that –favors, transmits and cements– the role of social preferences in a given economy and, in this way, it contributes to development. The paper thus considers two stances taken up in economic theory: (i) the theory of social preferences; (ii) the modern theory of development. These two stances do not exclusively and specifically refer to the third sector, and they generally follow parallel paths, rarely being aware of each other: in the paper, the third sector is assumed to form a bridge between them in that social preferences are supposed to be one of the driving forces in the change process of an economy.