El tamaño del sector cooperativo en la Unión Europea: una explicación desde la teoría del crecimiento económico.

The pillars of economic growth in the Western economies have been weakened by the current economic crisis. Some of the political answers entail an economic reactivation based on promoting entrepreneurial initiative. Although there is an abundance of literature on this topic, the study of company structures has received little attention. Among these, collective entrepreneurship, in general and cooperatives in particular are especially relevant in light of their greater resistance and flexibility in the context of a crisis such as the current one. This article aims to gain a deeper knowledge of the factors that explain the size of the cooperative sector using growth factors as its theoretical framework. The contribution of this paper rests on its international comparative perspective, surpassing microeconomic perspectives of entrepreneurial behaviour, based on 2009-2010 data from twenty-nine European nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]