The cooperative ownership model is used in a wide variety of contexts in the United States,
ranging from the production and distribution of energy to delivery of home health care services
for the elderly. Although cooperative businesses have been responsible for many market
innovations and corrections of market imperfections, little is known about their impact as an
economic sector. Until this project, no comprehensive set of national-level statistics had been
compiled about U.S. cooperative businesses, their importance to the U.S. economy, or their
impact on the lives and businesses of American citizens.
This report describes and quantifi es the magnitude of economic activity accounted for by U.S.
cooperative businesses. It describes the legal and economic characteristics that were used to
defi ne cooperative fi rms; methods used to measure cooperative activity across all sectors of
the US economy; and approaches developed to collect appropriate data. Finally, it provides
a census of cooperatives, summarizes the extent of their activity by economic sector, and
measures their impact on aggregate income and employment.