Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics最新文献

Despite the extensive literature examining determinants of tax morale, little is still known about the relationship between the associational involvement of citizens and their willingness to pay taxes. Given the insights offered by the social capital literature regarding the role of voluntary organizations in shaping civic engagement, this study empirically investigates how membership of different types of associations could influence individual tax morale in Europe. With this in mind, we exploit the information available in the fifth wave of the European Values Study for citizens of 34 countries. Unlike previous studies on tax morale, we classify the types of voluntary associations depending on their potential to build out-group “bridging” or in-group “bonding” social ties. In this study, to carry out the classification, three alternative approaches are considered which are based on the sociodemographic heterogeneity within associations, the interconnections between them, and a combination of both. Our findings show that, after controlling for different individual characteristics and country-specific unobserved heterogeneity, those survey respondents involved in bridging associations tend to exhibit higher levels of tax morale, while the opposite is found for bonding associations. The results are quite robust for the three approaches and different estimation strategies, including an instrumental-variables methodology.

Environmentally sustainable agricultural development is an essential part of the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations in 2015. This article systematically reviews studies on the role of farmer cooperatives in promoting environmentally sustainable agricultural development and uses China as a case study to analyze the measures and function mechanisms of farmer cooperatives in promoting the adoption and scaling of sustainable farming practices by farmers. Farmer cooperatives in China influence farmers’ farming practices and benefits by not only serving farmers with various information and technologies but also supervising farmers’ production processes. Nevertheless, farmer cooperatives, both in general and in China in particular, face challenges in effectively promoting the adoption of environmentally sustainable farming practices. A few policy implications are proposed based on these analyses.

This study examines the effect of women-centric agricultural self-help groups (SHGs) on intra-household decision-making in agriculture. Using data collected from an intra-household survey of 815 households, we analyze the effect of women's membership in different types of SHGs on 14 decisions related to farms and households. Specifically, we investigate the discord in decision-making, which is the difference in the perceived decision-making roles of spouses within a household. Our results show that women's participation in SHGs has increased their role in decision-making by 8–13%. However, the effects vary according to the type of intervention and the decision. We found fewer discords in intra-household decision-making in seed SHGs than in micro-finance SHGs. In conclusion, our study suggests that women's engagement in agriculture-based SHG interventions can encourage joint decision-making, but the magnitude of this effect depends on the type of SHG. Development agencies can use this information to design interventions targeted at empowering women through the improvement of the agricultural value chain.

In this study, we assess whether household outsourcing production tasks provided by tobacco cooperatives affect household technical efficiency, using the survey data from 449 households in Guizhou Province, China in 2014. The one-step estimation of the stochastic frontier production function is employed. We also use the instrumental variable approach to address the potential selection biases that may arise from unobserved factors that are correlated with both outsourcing service adoption and technical efficiency. The empirical results show that the farmers’ decision to outsource agricultural services provided by cooperatives has a positive effect on technical efficiency. The effects of outsourcing on technical efficiency are highly heterogeneous at different production stages. It is also interesting to note that the magnitudes of outsourcing effects on technical efficiency are similar between labor-intensive services and technology-intensive services.

An increasing number of studies illustrate and estimate the potential of the circular economy to create new jobs, most particularly for vulnerable groups at the labor market. This creates collaborating opportunities for Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) and circular economy ventures. Since a shift to a circular economy requires new visions and strategies, startups are considered as powerful engines for the innovation processes needed to support a circular transition. Nevertheless, academic literature at the crossroads of the circular economy, work integration of target groups, and startups remains quasi non-existent. In this paper we present results from survey-data of startups with varying implementation levels of circular strategies, and assess their willingness to cooperate with WISEs, or to engage in other forms of target group employment. We find a strong positive relationship between the implementation of circular strategies and work integration ambitions among startups. Circular startups who need skills on production, transportation, and logistics seek collaboration with WISEs for both inner (repair and redesign) and outer circle (recycling) strategies. Our findings suggest that the circular social economy faces specific barriers that need tailor-made enabling policies. We recommend WISEs to explicitly assess reskilling and upskilling opportunities while embracing the circular economy as a future-proof economic activity.

One of the innovative alternatives to the traditional cooperative structure has been the new generation cooperatives or cooperative companies, known as producer companies (PCs) in India since the early 2000s. This paper examines the impact of PCs on the member farmer livelihoods, which is not well studied, with the help of member and non-member farmer interview survey in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is found that though the PCs were inclusive of small farmers in their membership, the PC interface with members for farm inputs was not very strong and the output linkage was poor, reaching only a small proportion of member farmers. The Sufal Bangla public supermarket franchise by some PCs was found to make a large difference to the PC performance and its impact on member farmers. The small size of membership in most case study PCs hindered the equity size, leading to working capital and market interface constraints. Therefore, it is important to encourage members to contribute more equity and to reward their output linkage.

Supporting agricultural cooperatives might contribute to the livelihood improvement of many small-scale farmers in developing countries. This research examines the factors affecting the internet use of agricultural cooperatives with a focus on female leadership, its effects on cooperatives’ economic, social, and innovative performance, and the distributional effects of internet use on economic performance. Our analysis relied on the data of 3,512 agricultural cooperatives collected in 2021 from Vietnam. We addressed the endogeneity issue of internet use in impact assessment by employing an instrumental variable approach. Our results show that female leadership was positively and significantly associated with internet use and that internet use had a positive and significant effect on returns on assets, returns on equity, labor productivity, payment per laborer, contribution to labor union and insurance per laborer, and innovation in products of agricultural cooperatives. In addition, unconditional quantile regressions show that internet use in agricultural cooperatives exacerbated income inequality. Enhancing female leadership and promoting rural education were recommended to improve agricultural cooperatives’ performance.

Various policies have been implemented to encourage the development of family farms and cooperatives in the past decade in China. New technology adoption is a crucial part in promoting the performance of family farms. However, empirical evidence on whether and how cooperatives would facilitate family farms to adopt new technologies remains unclear. To address the gap, this paper examines the impact of family farms’ cooperative membership on new technology adoption (i.e., new varieties, new machinery, new fertilizers, new pesticides, new pest control techniques, new production methods and new management methods). Using novel survey data from 848 family farms in China, and employing both propensity score matching approach and endogenous switching probit model, we find that for family farms, cooperative membership has positive and significant impacts on new technology adoption. When looking into different types of technology, we find that the impacts are larger on the adoption of new methods than new techniques. Moreover, the impacts are larger for family farms with lower operation income and smaller size. The findings provide important insights for policymakers tasked with promoting agricultural technology adoption.

The fight against climate change has become a basic vector for agri-food business strategies. In Spain, commercial wineries (Investor Owner Firms, IOFs) and cooperatives are facing major challenges in adapting to the most stringent environmental requirements and in becoming sustainable and environmentally responsible companies. The European winemaking model, unlike its “new world” competitors, has a very distinct configuration with the predominance of the social economy in parallel with capitalist enterprises. However, these two forms of business organization are different in terms of objectives, position in the value chain, type of organization and form of management. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether these two types of companies have a different orientation towards sustainability, and which are the drivers that facilitate a greater approach to sustainability in each group. With a sample of 411 wineries, the results of the study show a lower orientation towards sustainability among the cooperatives, without a relevant alignment of their resources towards this objective. However, IOFs orient their resources towards sustainability in a consistent and strategic way. This may infer that the European model, with a clear advantage in the social component, could be somewhat more limited in the environmental aspect.

The current world situation leads us to consider that sustainable development needs to be a global priority to ensure the future of the planet and improve the quality of life. There is a need for sustainable finance to support this. Savings and credit cooperatives could help to achieve this impact as they serve the microfinance and microlending market. They facilitate the financial inclusion of the most vulnerable people, most of whom live in rural areas and are members of organizations, such as agricultural cooperatives and associations. Previous studies have focused exclusively on overall profitability, so this paper contributes to extending the literature by analyzing the whole population of savings and credit cooperatives in Ecuador (510 institutions), focusing on their profitability in two ways: the overall profitability necessary for the viability of the business and, in addition, the microcredit portfolio profitability, as a specific measure of its contribution to sustainability and social value creation. Another novelty is that the analysis has been carried out using several machine learning techniques for the wider generalization of the results. These show that size is the most relevant variable for predicting the ROE and that the microcredit portfolio profitability is conditioned by the credit variables.