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 ...

2 Is cooperative action modern or old fashioned? Why should policymakers pursue it in development strategies? In what way are cooperatives different in terms of economic theory and organisation theory? And if there are differences in organisation, human resource management practices, property rights and forms of collective action, what are the governance issues to be addressed so as to allow co...

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...