Although both economists and analysts tend to watch industry as an economic indicator, a recent survey shows that cooperatives in this country are alive and thriving.

Cooperatives not only account for 21,600 jobs in the country but this figure has climbed 46% during the years after 2008. Many are small but others, like milk products giant Dos Pinos, loom high in finding economic health in the nation.

The National Cooperative Development Institute (Infocoop) revealed this week that 1.1% of all persons working earlier this year (1.9 million total) got paychecks from cooperatives.

Infocoop has 409 signed up on its list, 49 more than in 2008. The survey of jobs included 376 of them. Unlike Dos Pinos, most are tiny — only 14% have more than 50 employees.

More than half are in the provinces, far from San Jose where private business tends to concentrate. The cooperative movement, aided by tax breaks from the government, will be 70 years old in 2013.

The cooperative movement has tended to be more accessible to rural women and is wildly varied in the goods and services they provide. Some 22% of them are in financial services, 12.7% in retail and wholesale trades and 15% in manufacturing.

One of the largest and oldest is Coopenae, a savings and credit cooperative with 85,000 customers, 435 officials and 416 billion colones of wealth built up over 46 years.

At the other end of the spectrum is Coopesuperacion with 35 employees — all of them handicapped. They operate the call center for the telephone company ICE.

The national newspaper La Nacion recently spotlighted one cooperative as an example of how such an entity can begin from modest beginnings. It began in Parrita, Puntarenas, with 150,000 colones collected among neighbors to reclaim the Parrita River basin from pollution.

Today, it thrives on a government environmental grant with 130 participants, mostly heads of households and housewives.

Source: Fijatevos.com