Do Labour Societies Perform Differently to Cooperatives? Evidence from the Spanish Building Industry

Cooperatives and Labour Societies are both Social Economy enterprises, but with noticeable differences, some of which are imposed by legislation in Spain. The aim of this paper is to study whether such differences affect their management capacity and, in particular, efficiency. In order to do so, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques to a sample of Spanish enterprises in the building industry and calculate indices of program efficiency. Results show that there is little difference between the performance of the two types of enterprises, although Cooperatives appear to have advantages over Labour Societies in regard to the management of working capital and, albeit to a lesser extent, labour.