This study analyzes characteristics determining member’s willingness to invest in cooperatives using ordered logit model. The data were collected in a field survey among 122 cooperative members in north-central China. The descriptive analysis of survey evidence suggests that cooperatives in China generally having poor ability to deliver the processing services related to product package, gradin...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to estimate the overall efficiency and productivity growth of credit cooperatives in Japan during 1992–1996. Overall efficiency is decomposed into output technical efficiency and input allocative efficiency. Twenty percent of all credit cooperatives in Japan are foreign owned with more than 90% of those owned by Koreans. The history of institutional discr...

BACKGROUND Out-of-hours primary care services have a high general practitioner (GP) workload with increasing costs, while half of all contacts are non-urgent. OBJECTIVES To identify views of GPs to influence the use of the out-of-hours GP cooperatives. METHODS Cross-sectional survey study among a random sample of 800 GPs in the Netherlands. RESULTS Of the 428 respondents (53.5% response r...

Black farmers in America have had a long and arduous struggle to own land and to operate independently. For more than a century after the Civil War, deficient civil rights and various economic and social barriers were applied to maintaining a system where many blacks worked as farm operators with a limited and often total lack of opportunity to achieve ownership and operating independence. Dimi...

This article examines the scope for strategies to build natural assets in the hands of low-income individuals and communities. Natural assets include sources of raw materials such as forests and fisheries, and the airsheds, lands, and water bodies that provide environmental sinks for the disposal of wastes. These resources become assets when people have rights to access their benefits. Four str...

Poverty, hunger and demand for agricultural land have driven local communities to overexploit forest resources throughout Ethiopia. Forests surrounding the township of Humbo were largely destroyed by the late 1960s. In 2004, World Vision Australia and World Vision Ethiopia identified forestry-based carbon sequestration as a potential means to stimulate community development while engaging in en...

Over the years since their meager beginnings, agribusiness cooperatives in the U.S. have compiled a checkered history of both praise and condemnation. Some observers have argued that cooperatives no longer communicate with, nor represent the best interests of their farmer members. Some critics suggest that cooperatives have stymied, or at least diffused, free market transactions in the agricult...

Black farmers in America have had a long and arduous struggle to own land and to operate independently. For more than a century after the Civil War, deficient civil rights and various economic and social barriers were applied to maintaining a system where many blacks worked as farm operators with a limited and often total lack of opportunity to achieve ownership and operating independence. Dimi...

ethanol producing bacteria are useful in industrial production of biofuel. there are interesting for screening of active bacteria from natural resources and introduce to biofuel industries. the present study aims to isolation of ethanol producing bacteria with characterization, optimization, and evaluation of their ethanol productivity. samples from various fruits, plant saps and soils were scr...