Spanish Co-Operatives and Economic Cycles, a Retrospective Analysis, 1942-2002

Abstract

There is a great deal of literature devoted to the study of the Spanish co-operative movement. However, until now no effort has been made to summarise the performance of co-operatives during the second half of the twentieth century. We know what happened from the last third of the nineteenth century, when trade unions were consolidated in industrial cities. Also, great advances were achieved in the trade union movement during the first third of the twentieth century in the agricultural sector. However, no study has analysed this movement from a long-term perspective. The main objective of this paper is to summarize the evolution of co-operatives from the early years of the Franco regime until the early twenty-first century. The purpose is to verify whether there is any correlation between the expansion or contraction of the cooperative movement as a result of fluctuations in the Spanish economy during this period, and to examine how far the paradigm is true that co-operatives respond better to periods of economic difficulty and rising unemployment. This work investigates how changes in the Spanish economic structure affected the number and activity of co-operatives. Consumer, agricultural, fishing, and industrial, transportation, housing, credit, education, services and health co-operatives had a different development framework which depended not only the law, but also changes in the productive balance of the Spanish economy. This process spanned the period from the era of dominance of agricultural cooperatives in the forties and fifties to the dynamism of industry and services from the late sixties until today.