Cooperatives and crisis: economic dynamics in Italian context

Abstract

This paper focuses on the situation in Italy with specific reference to cooperatives. It aims to analyse their economic situation -represented by two profitability ratios (ROI, ROE) -during the decade 2004-2013. It aims to tests the impact of crisis, geographical area and belonging business sector. Starting from secondary data on AIDA database (at the end 1,446 cooperatives), the trend analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) have been used. The findings show, first of all, that the profitability of cooperatives strongly affected by crisis. Secondly, only the business sector affects the level of profitability. The analysis is interesting because the income has a special meaning in cooperatives: it should, in fact, be added to benefiting members that are accounted for as "peculiar" management costs.

Primary sector in Italy: profitability dynamics and relationship with the international economic crisis

“…This is the case, for example, in the tanning industry (Migliaccio and Arena, 2018b) or for hotels (Migliaccio, 2018). This study, on the contrary, confirms the decreasing profitability already registered for the only Italian cooperatives operating in the primary sector (Fusco and Migliaccio, 2016b, 2019).…”

“…Also, the third hypothesis (H3) is partially unconfirmed because, considering the territorial economic imbalances that characterize Italy, they did not have different effects on the profitability of the farms located in the different areas, with some exceptions. Also, in this case, there are similarities for studies conducted for agricultural cooperatives (Fusco and Migliaccio, 2016b, 2019). The study showed that differences in profitability exist and, in some cases, the ANOVA test has allowed us to find some of them also with a certain statistical importance.…”

“…Among others, it is worth mentioning, Zecchini (1981) and Rizzuto (1986) and above all, the most recent volume by Salviati and Zitti (2006). Particular attention is given to the profitability of agricultural cooperatives in Sillani (2007) and in the most recent contributions by Fusco and Migliaccio (2016b, 2019), which inspired the methodology used in this research.…”

“…The international and Italian bibliography does not adequately examine the subject of the profitability of the agricultural enterprise by making use of the balance sheets data. This study provides this, which also uses numerous statistical elaborations and above all, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) method (Gu, 2013; Solari et al , 2009; Strang, 1980; Ross and Willson, 2017; HackerJoel and Angiolillo-Bent, 1981; Quirk, 2012; Liao and Li, 2018) that has already demonstrated its usefulness in investigations of this type (Iovino and Migliaccio, 2018a, b, 2019; Fusco and Migliaccio, 2015, 2016a, b, 2018, 2019; Migliaccio and Fusco, 2018; Migliaccio and Arena, 2018b).…”

Cooperatives' performance relative to investor-owned firms: a non-distorted approach for the wine sector

“…Therefore, given this ambiguous evidence in the literature, which can represent an intriguing gap to explore, the extent to which cooperatives can perform better than IOFs is the scope of the current research; naturally, as the presence of cooperatives in all economies and especially in the agri-food sector is so vast, as mentioned above, it was necessary to detect a specific context of investigation to pursue this goal. In the agricultural sector, Italy has a large and well-developed system of cooperatives that play a relevant role, as they produce more than a third of the total agricultural production; approximately 5,000 cooperatives operate in Italy, with a total turnover of approximately 40 billion euros and more than 90,000 employees (Italian Agricultural Cooperation Observatory, 2017; Fusco and Migliaccio, 2019).…”