Farmers' Cooperatives in Europe: Social and Historical Determinants of Cooperative Membership in Agriculture

Caroline Gijselinck and Matthias Bussels

Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 2014, vol. 85, issue 4, 509-530

Abstract: Membership rates of agricultural co-operatives vary widely across member states of the European Union. Inspired by various strands of literature (institutionalism, social capital theory, literature on transition countries and the software of the mind), we investigate historical and social determinants of those differences. We find that social capital and the legacy of communism are significantly correlated with the attractiveness of the co-operative sector for farmers, while the Hofstede indicators, measuring deeply rooted cultural values that otherwise are so robust and have correlations with many entrepreneurial and organizational aspects, are not. We describe our analysis and elaborate on the limits and implications of the data used and methodology applied.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/apce.12049 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:annpce:v:85:y:2014:i:4:p:509-530

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1370-4788

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics is currently edited by Marco Marini

More articles in Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().