The purpose of this paper is to analyze the productivity change for agricultural cooperatives in Japan measured by nonparametric output-oriented Malmquist indices of total factor productivity (TFP)┻ The productivity change is decomposed into technical change and technical efficiency change┻ Linear programming techniques are used to calculate the productivity change using a panel data set for 44...

Cooperatives have been used by the inhabitants in rural areas to gain access to telecommunications. In Bolivia and Finland, for example, consumer cooperatives have been for many years the only mechanism to provide local telecommunication services to the whole country. This paper studies the effects of the Bolivian market’s structure on the development of competition as well as on universal acce...

We characterize how just-selfish workers are incompatible with long-run success in workers’ cooperatives. Emphasizing mutual monitoring as key to cooperatives’ organization design to combat “shirking” we discuss what possible mixes of behavioral types in the membership of a cooperative are compatible with sustainable success. Sustainability depends on social preferences and cooperative norms th...

Conservation of tropical biodiversity in agricultural landscapes has become more important as the area covered by natural ecosystems decreases. We analyzed the effects of local livelihoods, cooperative types, and selected biophysical variables (elevation, slope, percent shade, distance to the forest, coffee density, and coffee age) on tree biodiversity in shade coffee cooperatives of El Salvado...

The development of Renewable Energy (RE) has become a major societal challenge. Even though RE technology is improving fast, the general public has been slow to adopt it. Meanwhile many RE cooperatives have been created; they act as social entrepreneurs in utilizing the social capital of a community to engage the public. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to consider how they can contribute t...

Cooperatives are a fairly new form of economic system in Korea compared to the western nations, yet, it has caught many attentions since the Fundamental Cooperative Act was enacted in 2011. Korea, once a very traditional community-based society, used to develop similar systems such as dooreh and poomasi. Thus, cooperatives have been astonishingly gaining popularity in various aspects recently a...

The first radio taxi service in Brazil was created in Curitiba in 1976. The business model used that time was still in place until the creation of taxi service online applications for mobiles in 2012. Taxi cooperatives and associations saw their traditional business model being run over by the new technology. The final objective of this investigation is to verify how the cooperative business mo...

BACKGROUND In recent years, Dutch general practitioner (GP) out-of-hours service has been reorganised into large-scale GP cooperatives. Until now little is known about GPs' experiences with working at these cooperatives for out-of-hours care. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into GPs' satisfaction with working at GP cooperatives for out-of-hours care in separated and integrated coop...

The future of energy generation is expected to become increasingly decentralized. Today, many customers are already more than demand units, they also act as energy producers (prosumers) and thus participants in the energy market. The development of energy cooperatives with underlying microgrids in recent years undermines this observation. Information and communication technologies enable the ma...

We hypothesize that institutions such as agricultural cooperatives influence regional levels of variety diversity through input supply, processing or marketing functions. This diversity can also affect yield, a partial measure of crop productivity. We test these hypotheses with data from southern Italy, a mega-diversity spot and centre of diversity for durum wheat. Cooperatives in the southern ...