Willingness to Invest in Agricultural Cooperatives: Evidence from Greece
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This paper uses logistic regression to analyze the characteristics that
determine Greek farmers’ willingness to invest in agricultural cooperatives.
The data are from a field survey of 235 Greek farmers – members of
agricultural cooperatives in Thessaly and Western Macedonia regions.
Although Greek farmers are commonly members of agricultural
cooperatives, the majority are inactive. Therefore, it is important to identify
motives that can increase farmers’ commitment to the cooperative. In this
paper, investment in cooperatives, which is vital for their sustainability, is
assumed as an indicator of farmers’ commitment to the cooperative. The
regression results demonstrate that education, urban residence, participation
in the cooperative’s administrative procedures, as well as the farmers’
perceptions of possible future strategies and previous managerial failures can
positively affect members’ decision to invest in the cooperative, confirming
three of our initial hypotheses. On the other hand, the hypotheses that the
existence of a successor in the farm and large farm size positively affect
farmers’ willingness to invest in the cooperative were rejected.