History of World Co-Operatives

Abstract

Co-operation is one of the important tools of social transformation not resorting to revolution but a process of mutual co- operative effort. World Heritage Encyclopedia refers that a worker co-operative is a co-operative owned and managed by its workers. A co-operative enterprise may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion or it may refer to one in which management is elected by every worker-owner and it can refer to a situation in which managers are considered and treated as workers of the firm. Though cooperatives play significant role in every sector of the economy such as agriculture, finance, energy, housing, healthcare, and digital platforms yet main objective of co-operative movement was making breakthrough in the stagnation of poorer classes especially the vast majority of agriculturists who were groaning under the heavy weight of indebtedness. Hence, Agriculture sector generally found the Co-operative movement more attractive as farmers use this mechanism for pooling their meager resources for solving common problems relating to credit, supplies of inputs and marketing of an agricultural produce. The objective of the review paper is to understand the history of cooperatives and its spread all over the world and future scope of cooperatives.