Productivity and Environmental Performance in Marketing Cooperatives: An Analysis of the Spanish Horticultural Sector

Abstract

The paper analyses the productivity of marketing cooperatives incorporating environmental inputs/outputs. In the European agriculture, expectations for attaining sustainable and competitive agriculture rely to a great extent on the cooperative sector's ability to adapt to new market conditions. These challenges have led marketing cooperatives in the fruit and vegetables sector to consider improvements in productivity and sound environmental performance. The study analyses the total factor productivity related to environmental variables in this sector using a parametric-stochastic approach and panel data on Spanish cooperatives over the period 1994-2002. Additionally, the determinants of environmental productivity are examined econometrically. The estimates obtained show an increase in efficiency for the period under study and a relationship between productivity changes and management factors, such as labour quality, capital intensity and environmental spillover. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Does an Endogenous Relationship Exist between Environmental and Economic Performance? A Resource-Based View on the Horticultural Sector

“…For instance, profitable firms may invest in new capital, which inevitably leads to lower emissions; it may be easier to pay attention to stakeholders and to obey moral standards towards environmental responsibility when business is sound; or regulatory environmental agencies may be more lenient towards economically bad performers than profitable ones. 1 Empirical analyses on the agricultural sector (e.g., Managi and Karemera 2005;Galdeano-Gómez et al 2006) show that environmental expenditure in firms or sectors has been growing in recent years as a result of better economic performance, in terms of profit and/or competitive advantage.…”

Frontier models for evaluating environmental efficiency: an overview

“…Using SFA, they propose a two-stage approach which allows the modeling of environmental efficiency determinants in the second stage. Explanatory variables for efficiency included proxies for labour quality (age, education, training, proxies for motivations etc), the physical environment and the institutional environment (see also Galdeano-Gómez et al, 2006). However, a substantial portion of environmental efficiency remained unexplained and the authors recommend complementary methods such as interviewing farmers to ascertain more about their objectives and attitudes.…”

Technical efficiency in the fresh fruit and vegetable sector: a comparison study of Italian and Spanish firms

“…The EU fresh fruit and vegetable sector is heterogeneous in terms of kind of products, methods of production, type and size of farms and marketing channels 3 . Moreover, the sector is characterized by high levels of concentration among retailers and discount chains as well as the increasing competition from third-world country imports.…”

“…The importance of agricultural cooperatives in economic terms, the significance they have gained in rural development and the role they play in the attainment of the objectives of the Common Agricultural Policy [1,2] justify the growing interest in studying their performance [3][4][5][6][7].…”