The face of agricultural lending has changed dramatically over the last several decades from both a demand and supply perspective. Farm numbers are down, but size is up. The distribution of farms is increasingly bimodal; 2% of farms today produce over one half of total sales. Largesized operations are capital intensive, utilizing the latest technologies embodied in variable and fixed inputs to ...

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...