Abstract
In recent years, the number of amalgamations of agricultral cooperatives is rapidly increasing and a lot of amalgamation plans are proposed. But little empirical works has done. This paper investigates a new method for specifing the optimal amalgamation of agricultural coopretives and applies it to Shonai district.
The procedure follows:
1) a long-run cost function of each department is estimated,
2) using the cost function, total costs (the total costs of cooperatives in the district) for all possible amalgamations are calculated, and
3) the amalgamation which minimize the total cost is identifed as the optimal amalgamation.
Because a huge time is necessary to calculate all total costs for possible amalgamations, we apply the Pierce's 0-1 integer programing for the calculation.
In the case of Shonai, the optimal number of coopratives turns to be 5. This is far less than the present number. And each cooprative after the amalgamation is well-balanced in terms of the size of each department.
Our method is useful for making the draft for the amalgamation of cooperatives.
