An Economic Examination of Establishment and Launching of Agglomerated Rural Cooperatives: A Case Study of Shahriar County in Iran

   Cooperative sector has the perspective to maintain 25% of the country’s economy, it covers a large number of small, and medium enterprises. Due to their small scale, they are not able to produce their products economically and they receive outside services at a very high cost to resolve their financial, technical, marketing and selling problems. On the other hand, the growth of production costs and low level of productivity and capital in cooperative units are among the main problems of cooperative sector. One of the solutions to this problem is to organize cooperative agglomeration to practice a uniform management for member cooperatives and to benefit from the economy of scale through the membership of similar and complementary units in the production of a specific product. This study has been carried out during the years 2008 and 2009. The results of economic appraisal of 16 individual livestock units and agglomerated livestock cooperatives indicated that economic indicators such as rate of return of capital, productivity of production units and annual benefit were higher in agglomerated cooperatives than in individual livestock units due to economy of scale. Based on this there is feasible to organize these in the mentioned county conditional upon the provision of capital resources.