Profitability of Italian cooperatives: The impact of geographical area and business sectors

This paper focuses on the situation in Italy with specific reference to cooperatives. It aims to analyse their economic situation - represented by two profitability ratios (ROI, ROE) - during the decade 2004-2013, that is before, during and after the crisis. Specifically, after an exploratory study, it wants to verify if there are statistically significant differences caused by geographical area and/or belonging business sector. With 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 findings show, at first, that the profitabilty of cooperatives has a very negative trend in any geographic area and business sector. So it is strong affected by crisis. Secondly, only the business sector affects the level of profitability. The analysis is interesting because income, in cooperatives, has a special meaning: it should in fact be added to benefiting members that are accounted for as ȃpeculiarȄ management costs.