Agricultural Production Cooperatives in the EU: Explaining Variation in Cooperative Development

This thesis examines variations in the development of cooperative businesses across member states in the European Union to identify and explain patterns in cooperative participation. Through a comparative analysis of statistical indicators coupled with regional analyses of historical determinants that may have incentivized cooperative participation, the current state of cooperatives in each region is highlighted and the relevance of each cooperative development indicator is discussed. This thesis uses literature on the early European cooperative movement, the development of the Common Agricultural Policy, and the current state of cooperative agricultural production to present a historically contextualized look at the European model of agricultural production and to highlight the patterns in cooperative development across regional groupings. The findings show that there is a strong association between regional groupings and average members per agricultural producers’ cooperative (APC) and a moderate association between average agricultural output and average members per APC. When knowledge of region and average agricultural output is present, there are reductions in error in predicting average members per APC. The findings indicate that cooperative development expectations among the different regional groupings might be changing as regions succeed in unexpected ways