This paper analyzes how producer cooperatives may bene t households in rural environments. In particular, it explores if cooperatives help poor households to exit poverty through three mechanisms: increases in prices, total factor productivity, and relaxation of credit constraints. In a multi-period model I characterize the conditions that must hold so that the always poor can exit poverty when...

OBJECTIVE This article examines the impact of contracting health care provision to health care cooperatives in Costa Rica. METHODOLOGY The article uses a panel dataset on health care outputs in traditional clinics and cooperatives in Costa Rica from 1990-99. RESULTS Controlling for community socioeconomic characteristics, annual time trends and clinic complexity, the cooperatives conducted ...

The Fair Trade (FT) initiative has been hugely popular with coffee consumers around the world, and yet the creation of durable producer rents is challenging in a competitive market environment. We model the FT premium actually received by producers and suggest that rents are in fact dissipated, but that this occurs in ways that are quite obscure to consumers. First, over-certification dilutes t...

A steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in Costa Rica and producer countries all over the world. One possible reaction was moving to specialty markets, where price pressure was perceived to be lower. We use original survey data from 2002/03 and 2003/04 to analyze the factors influencing efficiency levels of conventional and specialty coffe...

Rural entrepreneurship in the developing world has long been hailed as a powerful tool for promoting socioeconomic integration of young people and key to avoiding rural depopulation well ensuring these areas remain attractive places youth. However, there have no efforts investigate role collective creation management new businesses Morocco. Furthermore, we build on theory planned behavior (TPB)...

This paper aims at positioning producer cooperatives within the Transaction Cost Economics theory, one of the most cited and prolific theories on management studies. To accomplish this goal, I will answer the questions what is a cooperative, which transactions producer cooperatives regulate, under which market conditions they operate, and where are the boundaries for such organizations. This pa...