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Researchers and policymakers have identified the need to accurately and quantitatively evaluate cooperatives and their economic, social and employment effects, as well as their evolution over time, in a way that is as reliable as possible and not subject to interpretation. This need was also manifested in the adoption by the 20th International Conference of Labour Statisticians of the Guidelines Concerning Statistics of Cooperatives, which aim to facilitate the development of a set of statistics on cooperatives that can be compared at the international level. This study provides informative insights and analyses based on a unified statistical representation of the structure, economic performance and profiles of cooperatives—including cooperative groups— within the Italian economy. Through the integration of several official statistical data sources released by the Italian National Institute of Statistics with the Cooperative Register managed by the Ministry of Economic Development, on the one hand, the paper highlights the peculiarities of cooperatives compared to other companies; on the other hand, it analyses in depth the composition of the cooperative sector with respect to both economic and structural variables.

The objective of this chapter is to identify institutional solutions to the interrelated issues of social degradation and inequality. We build on the idea that the richness and poverty of social relations, and the outcomes that originate from this are in part caused by the unequal distribution of income and wealth, but also by the type of socio-economic institutions that a society gives itself and the behavioural attitudes associated with them. We discuss how, by reinstating cooperation and inclusion strategies within economic institutions, it becomes possible to deal with and balance at the same time individual behaviours and distributional issues. The paper builds on Ostrom's theory of commons and offers a framework that links institutional choices and reduction of social poverty.

In recent times, both researchers and policymakers have identified the need to develop statistics on cooperatives that can be compared at the international level. This need has also been discussed at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) held in Geneva in October 2013, which recognized the importance of having more comprehensive and internationally comparable statistics on cooperatives by adopting a resolution for advancing work on the topic (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2013). This paper summarizes the main results of the project “Terms of References for National Practices in Developing Statistics on Cooperatives” that is part of the series of initiatives undertaken by the ILO to better understand how data on cooperatives are collected and realised across the world. The project aimed at deepening the data collection methodologies and understanding the data collection process and the role of the institutions involved, the sources of data and the definitions, questions sets, classification schemes, methods and tools applied to collect and analyse data on cooperatives in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the Philippines, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom. The paper presents a synthesis of these country practices putting them into a common framework with proposals for a definition of cooperatives, as well as recommendations for a classification system and methods to release statistics on cooperatives.

Henry Hansmann has argued that ownership is best allocated to the group of patrons for which the total of cost of governance and contracting for all the firm’s patrons combined is minimized. This paper re-founds Hansmann’s model by considering an additional set of costs, the costs of excluding certain groups of patrons from the firm’s decision-making or governance process. The objective, which is Coasean in both spirit and formulation, is to show (1) that firms with “multi-stakeholder governance” emerge to economize on exclusion costs, and (2) that the efficient governance structure minimizes the total cost of membership, contracting and exclusion costs for all the firm’s patrons combined. The paper argues that this setup helps explain so-called “public organisation,” defined as organisations with public interest objectives, and further claims that this model helps explaining the recent emergence of multi-stakeholder enterprises within the third sector.

The study of private non-profit enterprises that offer general interest services is only at the start. The understanding of existing organisations resists an inclusive, public interest view of governance. This contribution aims at providing a reflection on specific features that non-profit enterprises should have, and outlines four main justifications for including stakeholders in production governance: 1) access to knowledge and other resources, 2) trust creation, 3) internal efficiency, 4) external efficiency. Conclusions elaborate on Hansmann’s classic theory of the firm to suggest that governance solutions need to be assessed on the basis of total costs, considering also the lower level of social costs that is created when governance includes relevant stakeholders. Our model highlights that when social costs are high, even an enterprise with costly decisional processes, such as the multi-stakeholder, can be the most efficient solution amongst other possible alternatives.