Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics最新文献

Effective government rules and regulations, as well as the ability of the regulator to curb corruption and promote voice and accountability, can influence the ability of bank management to allocate resources and ensure high performance. Based on this assumption, we aim to find out whether institutional quality is able to improve bank performance in Italy. To do so, we rely mainly on the diversity of banks, thus capturing the different behaviors of the two main categories, i.e. cooperative and for-profit banks. Using a parametric method, the results show a clear impact of most dimensions of institutional quality on reducing banks’ cost inefficiency. Some robustness checks, especially regarding the role of market structure, confirm our findings.

This paper estimates the impact of participation in governance on member satisfaction with cooperatives using survey data from 960 land cooperative members in the Yangtze River Delta. The instrumental variable approach is used to address potential endogeneity. We find that participation in governance increases member satisfaction with cooperatives by approximately 26.2%. In particular, the impact of participation in governance is much higher for elite members with political connections than for ordinary members. The recognition of member rights and duties increases the likelihood of member participation in governance. To achieve the long-term development of cooperative organizations, policy-makers should encourage cooperative members to actively participate in governance, for example, by increasing cooperative members’ understanding of their rights and responsibilities.

Native Community Development Financial Institutions (Native CDFIs) have become an increasingly important source of credit and financial services in the areas on or near American Indian reservations in the United States. Guided by a conceptual framework developed on the basis of the related finance literature and drawing on loan-level data from eleven Native CDFI loan funds, we offer the first systematic quantitative analysis of lending in the Native CDFI industry. As hypothesized, Native CDFIs on average give out small loans but support borrowers in varied circumstances with diverse loan products. Important predictors of delinquency include both conventional, hard information-based, measures of client risk, and alternative, soft information-based, community-informed and character-based measures. Overall, these findings lend strong support to holistic approaches for assessing client creditworthiness for Native CDFI operations. More generally, our analysis contributes new insights into the operations of an industry that plays an instrumental role in removing barriers to socioeconomic development in Native communities.

Terms of trade remain inherently volatile in the global market, exerting pressure on tax revenue with the resulting change in prices and trade (export or import) volumes. This study investigated the empirical relationship between terms of trade volatility from a regional perspective using a dynamic bias corrected model. A corrected dynamic fixed effect and one-step diff-GMM models are used to estimate the effect of terms of trade volatility using a set of panel data for 41 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1990 to 2022. The findings show that terms of trade changes have a positive effect on tax to GDP ratio and its volatility has indirect negative effects. Informal economic activities tend to deteriorate tax revenue in SSA. Thus, terms of trade volatility depress growth of GDP per capital and tax base in SSA. The findings imply the need for hedging the risks associated with terms of trade volatility, intensifying agriculture production and increasing the speed of formalizing informal sectors in order to reduce associated risks of depressing tax base in SSA.

Rural collective-owned cooperatives (RCOCs) have received significant attention for rural development, alleviating rural poverty, and achieving common welfare in China. Using the Social-ecological system (SES) framework as a conceptual and analytical lens, this paper clarifies the determinants and the influence mechanism for the economic performance of RCOCs. A mixed method, PLS-SEM combined NCA approach is applied to 420 smallholder farmers in rural China. The results reveal that rural collective property-rights system reform (RCPRSR), leadership, social capital, and collective action positively affect the economic performance of RCOCs. Moreover, leadership and social capital also operate through their mediating effect on collective action amongst collective members. Our results further show that RCPRSR, leadership, and social capital are necessary conditions for the high economic performance of RCOCs.

In times of crisis, the study of employment is of vital importance, especially that generated by cooperatives, which show great resilience. This paper analyzes the evolution of employment created by cooperatives in the different Spanish regions in relation to total employment between 1999 and 2019 with a pioneering approach. We analyze the existence of convergence clubs among the Spanish regions using the methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (2007, 2009). The results show the existence of four clubs that include the regions that converge in relative terms of cooperative employment over the 20 years analyzed. The lack of homogeneity in the behavior of employment in cooperatives in the different Spanish regions is demonstrated, with certain divergences among regions. These divergences make it difficult to establish a model of cooperative employment for the whole of Spain.

In recent decades, the largest European worker cooperatives, and those that are the most emblematic in their countries, have been transformed into multinational companies. This article examines workers’-cooperative multinationality by providing a classifying tool based on the interaction between control rights and return rights held by foreign employees in the subsidiaries of multinational cooperatives. We illustrate our matrix of cooperative multinationality by classifying an internationalized historical cooperative, Up Group (formerly Chèque Déjeuner, SCOP). In the last few decades, the French cooperative Up has become a hybrid multinational player in the employee benefits industry by setting up capitalist subsidiaries both in France and overseas. The case study also reports on Up's innovative attempt to produce a global cooperative or a more democratic multinational enterprise through converting subsidiaries’ employees into associates.

Although works councils provide a highly developed mechanism to promote workplace democracy, research on their consequences has been dominated by economic aspects. This study brings a new perspective to the understanding of works councils by examining their influence on workers’ political behavior. Political spillover theory suggests that participation in the firm's decision making has the potential to foster workers’ political participation in civic society. Our study for Germany indeed finds a positive association between the presence of a works council and workers’ interest in politics. This holds in panel data estimations including a large set of controls and accounting for unobserved individual-specific factors. However, separate estimations by gender show a positive association between works councils and political interest only for men, but not for women. Traditional gender roles may make it difficult for women to be politically engaged even when a works council is present.

This special issue features 14 new research papers investigating the role of farmers’ organizations (e.g., collective action, self-help groups, producer companies/organizations, and cooperatives) in supporting sustainable development. The key findings include: (1) farmer groups and cooperatives promote farmers’ adoption of good farm management practices, new agricultural technologies and sustainable farming practices, although not substantially improving farm yield; (2) outsourcing services provided by agricultural cooperatives help to increase the technical efficiency of crop production; (3) cooperative membership enhances members’ bargaining power and enables them to sell their products at higher prices; (4) cooperatives motivate rural laborers to work in off-farm sectors, while self-help groups empower rural women in decision-making; (5) internet use improves agricultural cooperatives’ economic, social, and innovative performances; (6) direct administrative intervention supporting cooperative development may lead to the emergence of shell cooperatives; (7) participation in forest farmer organizations enables wood value chain upgrading; (8) increasing the cooperative size in terms of income, equity, and assets increases the profitability of savings and credit cooperatives; and (9) creating cross-border cooperation between cooperatives generates benefits for all parties involved. These findings can inspire the design of policies aimed to support farmers’ organizations in achieving sustainable development goals.

Agricultural cooperatives are increasingly being viewed as an effective means of promoting agricultural technologies in developing countries. This paper examines the effects of cooperative membership on inorganic fertilizer use intensity. Employing a three-wave panel dataset relating to smallholder maize farmers in Ethiopia, we model inorganic fertilizer application as a two-step decision-making process involving both fertilizer adoption and its use intensity. To reflect these two related steps, we use a double-hurdle model. We account for unobservable household heterogeneity and endogeneity utilizing a correlated random-effects framework and a control function approach. The findings reveal that cooperative membership increased inorganic fertilizer use intensity, as well as the probability of it being used in the first place by 4.2% and 5.3%, respectively. Following further examination of who benefits most among cooperative members, we discovered that membership benefits all farmers in terms of fertilizer use intensity, irrespective of the members’ poverty status. However, we did not observe a significant effect of cooperative membership on the likelihood of fertilizer use by land-poor and less asset-endowed households. This highlights the necessity of implementing policies that provide poor and marginalized Ethiopian maize farmers with resources that enhance the contribution agricultural cooperatives make to their well-being.