Cooperative growth: Is it constrained?

This article explores the issue of cooperative growth from both an empirical and theoretical perspective. Using total assets as the measure of cooperative size, we present long-term, time-series data from seven of the largest regional agricultural cooperatives in Canada and the United States. We then examine the issue of growth from a theoretical perspective, integrating the literature on investor-oriented firm growth with the literature on cooperative growth. The empirical analysis that follows from the theoretical analysis suggests it is not possible to reject Gibrat's Law for six of the seven cooperatives; that is, that a cooperative's long-term growth rate is independent of its size. The empirical results also suggest the growth rate for the cooperatives in the sample is low, perhaps even zero.