Cooperatives And Global Economic Crisis 2008-2013: Financial Dynamics. Some Considerations From Italian Context

The global crisis still today interests different geographical areas. This paper focuses on the situation in Italy with specific reference to cooperatives. It aims to analyze their financial structure, in the period before and during the crisis (2004-2013), in relation to two discriminating factors. At this end, the study focuses on three research questions: what is the actual situation and what the trend has been in the last decade in the various Italian geographic areas and business sectors; if there are differences between business sectors and geographic area and if these differences are statistically significant. To these aims and starting from secondary data on AIDA database (at the end 1,446 cooperatives), the trend analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) have been used. The financial structure is assessed using two ratios: the Financial Leverage Ratio and Quick Ratio. The findings show that the financial structure of cooperatives have not been substantially affected by the crisis in any geographic area and business sector. Moreover these two factors produce statistically significant differences in the financial structure of cooperatives.