Are Cooperatives a Business Model that Makes this World a Better Place to Live?

One of the main incentives to promote cooperatives is that they enhance sustainable economic development centered on people and communities. In fact, cooperatives generate social value that transcends the economic profit.The main goal of this paper is to explore the nature of the link between cooperatives and individual wellbeing. To do this, we explore whether cooperatives are promoters of cooperative values and how both dimensions have an impact on happiness and life satisfaction. To that end, we combine micro data from the European Social Survey and macro data from the reports of Monzón and Chaves. Our final sample consists of 74,708 observations of European residents living in 16 countries along three years (2002/2010/2014).Among the main results, we highlight that the positive impact of cooperatives in building cooperative values and improving wellbeing lies in the number of people they employ and not in how many businesses are operating. This argument supports the basic principle of HR that the most precious resource of companies is precisely their workers