دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی عضویت همیارانه و انتخاب کانال های بازاریابی کشاورزان - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Cooperatives are established to improve farmers' production conditions, to increase their bargaining power and to enable them to benefit from modern value chains. In China, farmers are members of a cooperative for multiple reasons. Little is known on whether and how cooperative membership affects farmers’ choice of marketing channels. This paper examines determinants of farmers’ choice of marketing channels, especially how cooperative membership impacts upon this choice. Our analysis is based on survey data collected in 2015 among 625 apple growing farm households in the provinces Shaanxi and Shandong. We employ endogenous switching probit models to deal with potential endogeneity of membership in estimating the determinants of marketing channel choices. We find that cooperative membership has a positive impact on selling to wholesalers and a negative impact on selling to small dealers, but no significant impact on selling to the cooperative itself. As products sold through cooperatives generally comply with relatively stringent food quality and safety standards, these results imply that policies promoting cooperative members to sell their products through cooperatives are likely to have a significant impact on food quality and food safety in China.

Conclusions

This paper seeks to examine how cooperative membership affects farmers’ choice of marketing channels. Using transaction cost economics as a theoretical framework, we employ three endogenous switching probit models to estimate the determinants of each marketing channel based on field survey data collected among 625 farming households in Shaanxi and Shandong provinces in China. The empirical results show that cooperative membership has a significantly positive effect on the choice of wholesalers as marketing channels, along with a negative effect on choosing small dealers and an insignificant effect on choosing cooperatives. We explain the varying effects of cooperative membership on farmers’ choice of the different marketing channels mainly from the perspective of services by cooperatives. Both the current small market share represented by cooperatives and the services provided by cooperatives, especially the marketing information service and marketing coordination activities for members, explain the insignificant effect of cooperative membership on farmers’ choice of cooperatives as the marketing channel. Even if cooperatives do not buy their members’ apples, most of them collect marketing information, introduce wholesalers to members and help coordinate transactions for members. Membership thus exerts a positive effect on the choice of wholesalers, but a negative effect on the choice of small dealers, as a marketing channel.