Exporting and Firms’ Performance—What about Cooperatives? Evidence from Spain

This paper examines how exporting cooperatives evolve and differ from those that are focused on the domestic market. We use a Spanish firm-level panel data set spanning 26 years (1991–2016). We work with a wide set of variables that reflect cooperatives’ performance: sales, gross operating margin, productivity, wages, employment, capital intensity, skilled-labour intensity and R&D effort. The analysis deals with two working hypotheses: (i) Exporting cooperatives perform better than non-exporters, (ii) exporting boosts performance growth. With regard to the first one, we provide evidence that exporting cooperatives outperform those that are focused on the domestic market. Cooperatives that export are more productive, larger and pay higher wages than non-exporters. In addition, they are more capital- and skilled-labour intensive. The second hypothesis does not find such conclusive results. Only employment and skilled-labour intensity of exporters show significant faster performance growth than non-exporters. Results can lend weak support to the fact that exporting boosts performance growth.