Council Regulation (EC) No 1.435/2003, of 22 July 2003, concerning the European Co-operative Statute (ECS), constitutes the legal basis for the creation of european cooperatives, facilitating the development of their cross-border activities and contributing to their economic development. So, the...

Globalization, industrialization and structural changes in traditional rural employment patterns have caused rural communities such as the Israeli Kibbutz to search for development strategies in order to survive. Self development constitutes one possible approach to community development. It...

The aim of this article is to examine the Irish and Lithuanian credit union movements in terms of risk management and risk performance, and to discuss credit union risk regulation. Risk management in credit unions often closely relates to credit union development stages so that as credit unions...

This article uses the farm problem theory as the framework for a comparative analysis of cooperative, market and hierarchical organization in the agrifood system. In order to carry out this analysis, the article proposes the organizational economics approach to the farm problem which supplements...

The paper outlines a perspective on social entrepreneurship that is based on a Schumpeterian view of entrepreneurship as the creation of new combinations of resources, and focuses on the nature of actors engaging in the pursuit, and the nature of resources mobilized. So as to highlight less...

The cooperative sector in Belgium has always been very much linked to other social movements. In the 1990s the backbone of the sector, namely the cooperative banks, have undergone major transformations. In this article, the two most important cooperative financial holdings that were created to...

Agricultural producer cooperatives, especially dairy cooperatives, have been dominant in the agri-food sector, especially in Northern Europe. Recently there has been significant concentration and internationalization amongst dairy cooperatives as many have been transformed into large...

Cooperative enterprise has appeal as a means of filling gaps in the economic institutions of the rural sectors of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But in addition to problems that have faced cooperatives in the West because of their inherent...

A perusal of near 300 articles making up the editorial work of the Journal of Rural Cooperation throughout the years 1979-2005 allows to track down a sequence of significant trends. These start with a number of issues that we will denote as part of a “passé†agenda, through a...

This paper studies the effect of output-price uncertainty in an industry comprised of labor-managed firms (LMFs) in which the number of LMFs and their membership are determined endogenously. The exit condition for a risk-averse LMF member is formulated and the effect of various economic...