The Future of Agricultural Cooperatives

Murray Fulton () and Konstantinos Giannakas ()
Additional contact information
Murray Fulton: Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N 5B8

Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2013, vol. 5, issue 1, 61-91

Abstract: Cooperatives are of particular interest to economists because of their unique ownership structure and the incentives this structure creates. In addition to the so-called property rights problems (e.g., free-rider, horizon, and portfolio problems), the analysis of agricultural cooperatives has focused on issues of market power, agency, product quality, and increasingly producer and consumer heterogeneity. These last three elements are important features of the industrialization of the agrifood system. This article highlights the key concepts required for examination of cooperatives now and in the future and incorporates these concepts into a framework that can be used to examine the myriad situations and problem settings in which agricultural cooperatives are likely to be found. A key finding of the paper is that the procompetitive and distributional impacts of cooperatives depend critically on the sensitivity of price in the downstream retail market, the nature of the cooperative’s governance structure, and the open or closed nature of cooperative membership. The article also provides a discussion of new areas in which an understanding of cooperatives and collective action would be valuable, as well as a discussion of the applicability of the proposed framework to these areas.

Keywords: property rights problems; producer heterogeneity; consumer heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L13 L15 L22 P14 Q13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-resource-091912-151928 (application/pdf)
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

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:anr:reseco:v:5:y:2013:p:61-91

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Resource Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().