Tradeable Cooperative Shares

Kazuhiko Mikami ()
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Kazuhiko Mikami: University of Hyogo

Chapter Chapter 7 in Cooperatives and the Market Economy, 2025, pp 133-147 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The study in Part II suggests that cooperatives have efficiency advantages over capitalist companies in the goods and services market. By contrast, conventional cooperatives have efficiency disadvantages compared with capitalist companies in the capital market. This is because membership shares in cooperatives are supposed to be nontransferable, and indeed they are not traded in the share market. The non-transferability of their membership shares prevents cooperatives from using the share market and necessarily leads them to adopt the practice of the redemption of membership shares and share capital. As a result, cooperatives have no effective method of raising equity as permanent capital, which makes cooperatives more dependent on debt than capitalist companies. Under these circumstances, if there is a market failure in the debt market, cooperatives face a higher cost of capital than capitalist companies, putting them at a disadvantage compared with capitalist companies. This is presumably one of the principal reasons why, despite their potential advantages in addressing market failure in the market for goods and services, cooperatives are generally much rarer than capitalist companies in market economies. Why are shares in capitalist companies tradeable, while membership shares in cooperatives are not? This chapter focuses on this contrast from a technical perspective and examines whether and to what extent cooperative shares can be made transferable in the market.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-96-2128-6_7

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