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...

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...

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...

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 active participants in the energy market. The development of energy cooperatives in recent years undermines this observation. Information and communication technologies (ICT) enable management of energy...

Fadil, M., Farah, A., Haloui, T., Rachiq, S. Diagnosis of the aromatic and medicinal plant sector in Morocco: Case of the cooperatives and associations of the Meknès-Tafilalt area. Lazaroa 35: 155-165 (2014). The cooperatives and associations in the medicinal and aromatic plant (MAP) sector are completely dependent on the pressure of market demand, and their products need to comply with require...