Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics最新文献

In the context of recent reforms affecting the public sector, maximizing good governance and performance of state-owned enterprises is a major challenge for governments. The aim of the study is to provide a systematic and holistic review of the literature related to corporate governance and performance of state-owned enterprises, to highlight and clarify the evolutionary trajectory of the field. To achieve the research objective, 409 publications that mention the term state-owned enterprises and performance, indexed in the Web of Science database between 1997 and 2022 were analyzed by applying multiple bibliometric analysis methods and content analysis. The citation and co-citation analysis results offer an outline of the most influential articles and journals, and links between authors, and provides a thematic classification. Through keyword co-occurrence analysis, the paper highlights the research trends in the literature concerning state-owned enterprises and proposes future research directions.

The self-sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs) is a growing concern as they work as non-profit organizations to achieve global poverty reduction goals. This study aims to examine the MFIs' self-sustainability using an efficiency measurement technique based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). It also determines the influence of different financing sources on MFIs' self-sustainability as well as the moderating impact of external governance on this relationship. It uses the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator to analyze the panel data from 661 MFIs in 86 countries during the 2010–2018 period. The DEA analysis reveals that MFIs are still in the intermediate stage of self-sustainability in terms of technical and cost efficiency. The second-stage regression results reveal that financing sources such as retained earnings and equity have a robust positive and statistically significant effect on the MFIs' self-sustainability, implying that MFIs that rely more on these two sources are more likely to be self-sustainable. The moderation analysis reveals that good governance accelerates the positive effect of financing sources on MFIs' efficiency. Given these empirical findings, MFIs' decision-makers can benefit from considering their own funding and equity. Quality governance can be ensured by government agencies and regulatory bodies to support the MFIs' sustainability.

Dairy farmers in developing countries face numerous challenges, including price instability, limited credit access, outdated technology adoption, market barriers, and poverty. Cooperatives offer promising solutions to farmers’ problems and help them enhance their agricultural sustainability. Although the impact of cooperative membership has been widely investigated, little evidence is found in dairy farming households. This study estimates the impact of cooperative membership on dairy farmers’ household incomes, net returns, and profits from dairy products (processed and fresh milk). The cross-sectional data were collected from 300 dairy farmers in East Java, Indonesia. Inverse probability weighting with regression adjustment (IPWRA) and two-stage predictor substitution (2SPS) were used in the analysis to address the selection bias in the estimation. The findings are corroborated by a robustness check using propensity score matching. The results show that dairy farmers’ decisions to join a cooperative are positively and significantly influenced by farming experience, transportation ownership, number of cattle owned, and involvement in social activities and are negatively influenced by age. Cooperative membership significantly improves farmers’ welfare by increasing their household incomes, net returns, and profits from fresh milk products. However, the membership reduces profits from processed milk products. These findings suggest that the government should encourage farmers to participate actively in cooperatives.

Outsourcing of public services is under heightened scrutiny. Public managers are asked to conduct thorough “make or buy” assessments to help assure deliverability, affordability, and value for money of public services. The naivety of this request dramatically overlooks the subtlety and challenge faced by public managers. In this paper we connect a range of differently configured contractual agreements to underlying components of “value for money”, namely, the pursuit of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. We set out a framework consisting of conceptual models and the corresponding decision tree to allow comparison across alternative sourcing strategies, considering both the associated transaction costs and transaction benefits. We also use simulation methods to capture uncertainty while establishing the practicality of the framework. This study advocates for moving beyond the polarized ‘make or buy’ debate with more instrumental considerations of “how to buy” from the perspective of the public manager.

We analyze the problem of fairly locating two facilities providing a public good in two spatial models: a city line and a network. Each facility is characterized not only by its location but also by its quality. We introduce new notions of envy-freeness and fairness that can be applied to spatial settings. We show that the tax scheme adopted to finance the public good has a key role in determining the existence of a spatially fair configuration of facilities.

This study investigates the commitment of farmer members to traditional and hybrid cooperatives, and examines how and why their commitment has changed over time. The empirical basis consists of three surveys of representative samples of Finnish farmers conducted in 2010, 2013 and 2016. Dairy cooperatives in Finland have a traditional organizational form. Animal breeders deliver to hybrid cooperatives that have some external investors, but farmers have the majority of the votes. In both industries, the farmers are committed to their cooperatives and increasingly so over the years. This is particularly true of dairy farmers. However, the members’ commitment is based more on their satisfaction with the cooperatives’ business activities rather than on any cohesion within the cooperative societies. One explanation for this is that primary agriculture is becoming more consolidated, with fewer but larger farms whose owners are business oriented and professional.

Although teff (Eragrostis tef) is a very important staple food crop in Ethiopia, its production is constrained by low productivity due to poor access and adoption rate of improved seed by farmers. The government of Ethiopia envisions realizing an efficient teff value chain that enables a sustainable increase of smallholder teff productivity. As a result, the government is supporting seed producer cooperatives (SPCs) to supply improved teff seeds to farmers. The aim of this study is to compare teff productivity at household level among members and nonmembers of SPCs. To this end, a cross-sectional survey design with multi-stage sampling method was used to select 386 sample households (193 SPC members and 193 nonmembers). As membership in a cooperative is voluntary, farmers may self-select into a given SPC according to their own motivation and interest. In a bid to address the potential issue of selection bias from both observed and unobserved heterogeneities, we employ the treatment effects model (TEM), which allows for a specific correlation structure between the unobservables that affect the treatment and the unobservables that affect the potential outcomes. Results show that, on average, SPC members produce 1.406 more quintals per hectare compared with their nonmember counterparts.

Member commitment has an impact on the viability and success of cooperatives. While there are studies on member engagement in European and American cooperatives, empirical research on member commitment in Chinese agricultural cooperatives is rare. Using a sample of 391 farmer cooperative members in China, this study investigates the factors associated with member commitment, particularly whether trust in the cooperative leadership and social pressure at village level affect member commitment. In addition, the study explores the pathway how trust and social pressure affect member commitment by employing structural equation modelling. Our results show that both trust and social pressure are positively associated with the three components of member commitment – affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment – in a direct way. Furthermore, trust in the leadership impacts affective commitment indirectly via the mediation of member participation. These findings can be used by cooperative leaders, policy makers and rural administrators to strengthen member commitment and thereby the economic viability of agricultural cooperatives and the communities in which they are embedded.

Non-compliance with transparency obligations among publicly owned enterprises has revealed the lack of coercive capacity of the legislation. In this context, literature suggests that mandatory disclosure becomes a matter of company willingness, but this has not been empirically tested so far. Drawing on Oliver's (1991) typology of organizational strategies and studies on normativity production, this study analyzes whether voluntary disclosure levels of financial and non-financial information determine compliance with transparency legal requirements for the case of Andalusian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) owned by local and regional governments. We have verified this question using linear regression analysis. The analysis proves that when transparency legislation lacks enforcement power, the level of voluntary disclosure determines the level of legal compliance. Both voluntary and mandatory disclosure levels are explained by the same determinants, suggesting that disclosure is determined by reasons of legitimacy and commitment to transparency. This contributes to the research lines on normativity and transparency in SOEs, being also relevant for lawmakers. This study provides evidence for Oliver's (1991) theoretical arguments about firms' strategies in the face of institutional pressures. It offers policy-makers and SOE managers an insight into how prepared SOEs are to respond to the demands for greater transparency.

This paper aims to empirically explore the linkage between the cooperative sector and economic growth in Italian provinces (NUTS-3), through a panel analysis covering the period between 2013 and 2019. We hypothesize that the cooperative sector can contribute to economic growth through its ability to generate social capital, thereby helping to mitigate market failures. The empirical analysis does not provide us with robust evidence of the positive connection between the cooperative sector as a whole and local economic growth. However, when we disaggregate the cooperative sector into ordinary and social cooperatives, we find intriguing results. Indeed, there is robust evidence of a negative relationship between the territorial distribution of ordinary cooperatives and economic growth, while for social cooperatives we find a positive relationship. We interpret these results as showing that the pursuit of general interest objectives, which allows the principle of mutuality to be extended to indirect forms of reciprocity, could make cooperative firms more effective in promoting the economic performance of territories. This is because they are more likely to generate bridging social capital that encourages the spread of generalized trust, a key factor in the advancement of modern market economies.