Abstract
Sustainable development in the knowledge economy faces new challenges. Sustainable development has its stakeholders and drivers; some of them are more important than the others. Financial cooperatives do not seem a substantial stakeholder of sustainable development, but only at the first sight. This paper deals with the evaluation of financial cooperatives as drivers for sustainable development in the knowledge economy through community empowerment. Cooperative banks are stakeholder-value institutions, when the traditional commercial institutions are referred to as shareholder-value ones. Members of cooperatives are their stakeholders at different levels. Small financial cooperatives, like credit unions exist to attain the economic and social goals of their members, and not maximizing profit and shareholder wealth. This enables credit unions to empower communities to pursue specific interests of their local communities. The analysis of statistical data in order to establish whether there is a correlation between the level of prevalence of credit unions in different countries and the level of development of the knowledge economy and the selected sustainable development indicators is presented in this paper. The analysis indicates for an increasing positive correlation depending on credit union industry development stage.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.66.4.5497
Highlights
Over the recent decades, sustainable development has been promoted by a number of EU policies
The Rio+20 conference adopted the outcome document “The Future We Want” which highlights the current issues of sustainable development
The Rio+20 pays the particular importance on engaging major groups and other stakeholders into sustainable development processes, from planning to implementation (The Future We Want, 2012)
Summary
Sustainable development has been promoted by a number of EU policies. The authors of this paper have made the assumption that, in the community level, one of the most effective economic mechanisms for fostering the sustainable development could be a traditional cooperative financial institution, which represents not the interests of shareholders (e.g. a commercial bank), but the interest of stakeholders and communities (e.g. cooperatives – cooperative banks and credit unions). The logic and the objectives of this paper are as follows: 1) to reveal the new foundation for sustainable development; 2) to analyse the significance of community networks for sustainable development and community empowerment through financial cooperatives; 3) to discuss the role of financial cooperative institutions in the economy depending on their maturity level; 4) to calculate and evaluate correlations between knowledge economy indexes and certain statistical activity indicators and level of prevalence of financial cooperatives.
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