This study was undertaken in Indonesia and the research
problem addressed was to determine whether financial structures and financial
performance of small enterprises, with cooperatives and non-cooperative
structures, differ and explain any differences identified. The study was restricted
in terms of data collection, to small enterprises that operated in one province of
Indonesia and to those cooperatives selling products or services to members in
the province. In this study, a cooperative was defined as a business enterprise
with members that include individuals or legal entities and one that operates its
activities based on cooperative principals as defined within Indonesia. A
theoretical framework was developed indicating that financial characteristics and
performance and also cooperative structure were likely to be affected by financial
skills of the enterprise owner and manager, various financial institutions in the
marketplace, and the environment – economic, legal and fiscal. Field data was
collected from about 160 cooperatives and some 70 non-cooperative enterprises
in the province with a final total of some 130 usable bits of data. This data was
used to calculate various measures of financial performance and tests were made
to examine the relationship between factors in the research model. As an overall
conclusion, the study demonstrated that there were significant differences in financial characteristics and performances of small enterprises structured either as
cooperatives or non-cooperatives. The researcher examined the implications of
these outcomes, and suggested further research