Why Danish credit co-operatives were so unimportant

Abstract

Denmark's credit co-operatives were introduced relatively late and were never as important to the Danish financial system as credit co-operatives in several similar European countries. This experience stands in contrast to the experience of other co-operative enterprises in Denmark, most notably co-operative creameries. We argue that the Danish experience does not reflect a lack of need for such institutions or an inability to adapt them to Danish conditions. Rather, in the 1860s rural Danish people had succeeded in adapting another form of financial institution, the savings bank, to serve the needs of the small borrowers who elsewhere were the main clientele of the credit co-operative. Thus much of the need for credit co-operatives had been satisfied by another institution. The Danish experience illustrates both the adaptability of financial institutions and the sensitivity of co-operatives to competition for their niche in the financial system.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.