"This paper examines the impact of cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals, using detailed household data from rural Ethiopia. We review the involvement of cooperatives, in terms of who participates and where they are located. We then use the strong government role in promoting the establishment of cooperatives to assume that the decision of where to establish a cooperative is largely driven by external considerations, and is thus exogenous to the members themselves justifying the use of propensity-score matching in order to compare households that are cooperative members to similar households in comparable areas without cooperatives. Four conclusions are derived from the analysis. First, despite the spread of cooperatives – they existed in less than 15 percent of districts in 1994 and nearly 35 percent in 2005 – there are important disparities across regions. Within regions, cooperatives tend to be located in areas that already have better access to markets and lower exposure to price and environmental risks. Second, at the household level participation is only 9 percent, with poorer households less likely to participate. Third, while cooperatives obtain higher prices for their members, they are not associated with a significant increase in the overall share of cereal production sold by their members. Fourth, these average results hide considerable heterogeneity in the impact across households. In particular, we find smaller farmers tend to reduce their marketable surplus as a result of higher prices, while the opposite is true for larger farmers." from Authors' Abstract
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in its series IFPRI discussion papers with number
722.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: