The Relation between Total Employment and Cooperative Employment: A Convergence and Causality Analysis

The article analyses the evolution of the employment created by cooperative societies and its relationship with total employment in Spain during 1994-2007. We focus, first, on the comparison of the convergence processes of cooperative and total employments and second, on their relationship, in the Granger sense. For this, we use the institutional approach, which assumes the existence of a different degree of relationship between the cooperative societies and their environment according to the number of these societies in a region. Results show that the evolutions of cooperative and total employment are opposite and that total employment influences cooperative employment at the aggregate level.