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A multiple factor analysis is developed to assess the differences in the economic performance and employment levels of social cooperatives in three main geographical areas, North, Central and South Italy, between 2008 and 2011.The results showed that despite the global economic and financial meltdown, the social cooperatives in these areas increased their overall turnover and total assets between 2008 and 2011.Furthermore, the employment data showed a positive trend during this period. The analysis also found that the prolonged crisis in 2010 and 2011 affected mainly the southern regions, where conjunctural factors exacerbated long-term structural deficiencies.

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The theoretical and empirical literature reports that worker co-operatives protect employment better than investor-owned firms (IOFs) do, especially during economic downturns. This paper introduces the new hypothesis that not only worker co-operatives but all cooperative types (e.g. worker, producer, consumer, credit) protect employment better than IOFs do because they all satisfy their members' needs-instead of maximizing shareholder value-by delivering a stable stream of goods and services. A long-standing pattern in needs satisfaction implies constant activity and employment. To substantiate our hypothesis theoretically, we resort to the evolutionary interpretation of the firm as a problem solver and to the literature on organizational resilience. We test the hypothesis using the data released by the Italian Institute of Statistics for all Italian enterprises in the 1996-2008 pre-crisis and 2008-15 crisis periods.Dynamic multifactor partitioning confirms that in Italy, all typologies of co-operatives withstood the crisis better than other business forms did and that co-operatives were affected the least by economic cyclicality and employment loss.

Over the last decade, independent agencies, institutions and research centres (ISTAT-National Statistic Office, Ministry of Economic Development, Confcooperative Legacoop, Unioncamere) have provided studies on the evolution of the cooperative movement in the Third Sector in Italy in order to monitor the development of these organizations over time and to evaluate their economic and employment impact in the country. Following a similar path, this study analyzes the contribution of social cooperatives in Italy at a regional level, highlighting the differences related to their longevity and fields of activity. Moreover, the article evaluates the efficiency and profitability of the social cooperative by adopting principal component analysis to economic and financial indexes.