Ireland in a Danish mirror: A microlevel comparison of the productivity of Danish and Irish creameries before the First World War

The relative success of the Danish and failure of the Irish dairy industries before the First World War is often contrasted. The traditional narrative assumes that the Irish failed because they were unsuccessful at adopting cooperative ownership, and that Irish cooperatives were not as efficient as their Danish counterparts, despite having been explicitly modelled on them. This is, however, untested at the ‘firm’ level. We rectify this through the analysis of a large microlevel database of creameries in both countries over the period 1898–1903. Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), a standard methodology in modern productivity studies, we find that Irish creameries were in fact slightly more efficient on average than their Danish counterparts, although with a larger variance. This nuances the idea that the Irish were unable to establish cooperatives successfully, although some creameries were certainly laggards, and the reputational cost of this might have impacted the industry.