TY - JOUR 
A1 - Guzmán Raja, Isidoro
AU - Arcas Lario, Narciso
AU - García Pérez De Lema, Domingo
T1 - Sustainable growth of the Spanish agricultural cooperatives
Y1 - 2007
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10317/686
AB - In a market as competitive as the present, growth is one of the objectives that companies
seek, insofar as it can help them to remunerate the agents who intervene in the process of
generating value. However, business growth is not without problems associated to the resources
needed to achieve it, and that, if they are not compatible with the financial capacity of the
company, could create liquidity tensions. Thus, to improve their competitiveness, it is important
that the companies adjust their real growth to the desired (sustainable) growth.
This question is applicable to the agricultural cooperatives, particularly when taking into
account their peculiar characteristics. In this context, as its principal objective the present work
aims to recognise the evolution in real growth in Spanish agricultural cooperatives and their
degree of adaptation to the desired growth (sustainable growth). To that end an empiric study
on a sample of Spanish agricultural cooperatives over a period of five years (2000-2004) was
carried out. Our results indicate a certain imbalance between the rates of real and sustainable
growth: although at the beginning of the period studied the rates showed an excess in real
growth, in the latter years this tendency is inverted, and a slowing down in growth investments
is detected. This situation could be justified by the special characteristics of this type of
company, such as their mutualism, "open doors" policy, and restriction in profit sharing to their
members, among others.
KW - Economía, Sociología y Política Agraria
KW - Crecimiento sostenible
KW - Mercado competitivo
KW - Agricultural cooperatives
KW - Sustainable growth
KW - Competitive market
KW - Cooperativas agrarias
LA - eng
PB - European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE)
ER -