Southern Cooperatives as an Answer to the Problem AI Has Not Yet Posed to France

In Italy, cooperatives employ approximately 1.1 to 1.3 million workers and have 12 million members (shareholders), with total revenue estimated between 127 and 140 billion euros. This sector is not that of a niche activist movement. It is that of an industrially mature sector, present in logistics, agribusiness, personal services and construction, capable of weathering recessions without laying off workers at the same rate as the classical sector.

More fundamentally, it is a model of ownership that redistributes productivity surplus in ways other than through taxation. And this is precisely why this subject, which seemed reserved for advocates of solidarity economics, becomes urgent at the moment when artificial intelligence is settling into companies.

The Essentials

  • Italy has between 1.1 and 1.3 million workers in cooperatives, with total revenue estimated between 127 and 140 billion euros (RECMA/ICA)
  • Spain is investing 808 million euros in its PERTE for Social Economy and Care dedicated to the social economy, until 2026
  • The Italian impact investing market grew from 5.8 to 9.3 billion euros between 2020 and 2022, according to data from Fondo Italiano d’Investimento and Human Foundation; at the European level, this market was estimated at 80 billion euros in 2022
  • France has a significant cooperative fabric but without a national investment framework comparable to that of Spain or Italy
  • The real issue is not whether cooperatives are virtuous, but whether they can absorb the productivity gains that AI generates before taxation has time to redistribute them

AI Productivity Poses a Question of Ownership Before It Is a Tax Question

AI increases productivity. Studies converge on this point, even if the orders of magnitude remain debated. What is less debated is the mechanism for distributing these gains. In a classical enterprise, additional productivity belongs first to shareholders. It can then be redistributed through collective bargaining, then through taxation. Both channels work, but slowly and incompletely: collective bargaining assumes powerful unions and companies willing to play the game, taxation assumes stable tax bases and governments capable of acting in time.

Shared ownership short-circuits this sequence. When workers are co-owners of the means of production, productivity gains accrue to them structurally, without waiting for negotiation or parliamentary vote. It is simple and mechanical. This is also why economists as unsuspected of activism as Daron Acemoglu have started to take an interest in ownership structures as a key variable in the distribution of technological gains. His work with Simon Johnson on who captures the benefits of automation points to exactly this mechanism: technology does not redistribute itself, it is ownership institutions that do so.

Cooperatives are not the only answer to this question. But they are one of the rare answers that operates at the enterprise level rather than at the state level. And the laboratory that Italy and Spain constitute offers thirty years of data on what this model actually produces, far from polemics.

Italy: When the Cooperative Becomes an Industrial Sector

The Italian model was not built by decree. It was built through accumulation, in specific regions, around specific sectors, with specific financial actors. Emilia-Romagna is the most documented illustration: this region, whose GDP per capita exceeds the European average, concentrates a density of cooperatives that represent approximately 25 to 30% of its regional GDP according to data from Legacoop, the main Italian cooperative federation.

What allows this model to function at this scale is less the activist virtue of its members than its financial infrastructure. Unipol, one of Italy’s leading insurance companies, is a cooperative. Fincooper and Cooperfidi are mutual guarantee structures that allow cooperatives to access bank credit under conditions comparable to classical enterprises. These tools transform the cooperative from a lifestyle project into a competitive market actor.

Resistance to crises is documented. During the Italian recession of 2008-2013, cooperatives significantly reduced their workforce less than comparable classical enterprises, according to a study published in the International Review of the Social Economy. This stems from the governance structure: when workers are owners, they generally prefer to reduce individual income in the short term rather than expel members. This mechanism is not universal and does not work in all conditions, but it is robust enough to be observed across several cycles.

Italy has also created a legal framework that facilitates the transfer of enterprises toward the cooperative model. The Marcora Law of 1985 allows employees to use their advanced unemployment benefits to collectively buy back their company. Over forty years, this mechanism has enabled the transformation of several hundred failing enterprises into viable cooperatives. The French equivalent, the buyback of enterprises by employees in the form of SCOPs, exists but remains marginal, due to lack of equivalent public financing and a managerial culture that would facilitate it.

Spain Commits 808 Million Euros to Structure What Was Dispersed

The Spanish PERTE Social is a less well-known program than the major reindustrialization plans, but structurally more interesting for understanding how a state can accelerate a sector without nationalizing it. The PERTE for Social Economy and Care, endowed with 808 million euros until 2026, does not finance individual cooperatives. It finances the infrastructure of the sector: training platforms, shared digital tools, financing mechanisms, shared research and development.

This approach is consistent with an already powerful Spanish social economy. Mondragón, the Basque cooperative corporation founded in 1956, employs 80,000 people across 80 enterprises, from the household appliance group Fagor to the large retailer Eroski. This model is often cited as proof that the cooperative can function at large scale. It is also sometimes cited as proof of its limits: during the 2013 crisis, Fagor went bankrupt, and its 5,600 workers lost their jobs, revealing that cooperative solidarity has boundaries, often the boundaries of the individual enterprise.

The Spanish response to this limit is precisely the PERTE: to create mechanisms for inter-cooperative solidarity, as Mondragón did at the corporation level, but at the level of an entire sector. The idea is that the social economy will be more resilient if it is interconnected rather than atomized. This bet is not yet won, but it rests on logic proven in other industrial contexts, notably the Italian industrial districts that economists like Giacomo Becattini have documented since the 1970s.

Impact Investing as a Signal of Maturity, Not a Passing Fad

In Italy, the impact investing market grew from 5.8 to 9.3 billion euros between 2020 and 2022, according to data from Fondo Italiano d’Investimento and Human Foundation. At the European level, this market was estimated at 80 billion euros in 2022. These figures deserve careful reading: they do not mean that capital has become altruistic. They mean that institutional investors have identified in the social economy an acceptable risk-return ratio, and in some cases better than that of the classical market.

This evolution is significant because it changes the nature of financing available for cooperatives. For a long time, the social economy depended on public subsidies or limited equity. The entry of patient private capital, oriented toward long-term returns, opens growth possibilities that self-financing alone did not allow. Funds like Phitrust in France or Triodos in Europe invest explicitly in structures with shared ownership, with governance criteria that exclude short-term profit maximization.

This dynamic addresses a question that the debate on AI and work poses directly: if economic value can be created by smaller teams thanks to automation tools, who owns the tools? The classical answer is the shareholder. The cooperative answer is the worker. Impact investing is beginning to bet on the second option.

What France Does and What It Has Not Yet Built

France is not absent from this story. It has approximately 24,000 cooperatives, including leading agricultural cooperatives like InVivo or Sodiaal, banks like Crédit Agricole or Banque Populaire that stem from the cooperative movement, and approximately 4,558 SCOPs and SCICs employing nearly 87,700 people according to the General Confederation of SCOPs (2024 data). The legal framework exists: the Hamon Law of 2014 on social and solidarity economy created a legal definition and some transparency obligations for large enterprises.

What is missing is precisely what Italy and Spain have built: dedicated financial infrastructure and a national investment program commensurate with stated ambitions. The Banque des Territoires, a subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts, finances social economy projects, but without the scope or coherence of the Spanish PERTE. France Active supports structures, but its resources remain modest. The Higher Council for Social and Solidarity Economy produces reports, but without budgetary engagement power.

This asymmetry is paradoxical for a country that regularly claims to follow the European social model. It is explained in part by an administrative culture that sees cooperatives as a hybrid object difficult to classify, neither truly public nor truly private, and therefore difficult to finance according to usual logics. It is also explained by the power of classical sector actors in defining French industrial policies, where the social economy is often confined to social policy rather than economic policy.

The shift in conceptual framework that the AI debate imposes could change this situation. As the analysis of knowledge transfer between North and South showed, models that seemed peripheral become central when conditions change. If the political question of the next decade is indeed “who captures AI’s gains?”, shared ownership structures are no longer a curiosity of the social economy: they become an institutional response to a central problem.

The Limits That the Laboratory Also Reveals

Intellectual honesty requires noting what Italian and Spanish data show less positively. Cooperatives are less present in high-growth technology sectors than in services and traditional industry. Mondragón has not produced the equivalent of a first-generation technology startup. Democratic governance, which is the model’s strength for stability, can be a slowness for the rapid adaptation that some sectors require.

Moreover, the resistance to layoffs that cooperatives display in times of crisis has a counterpart: they hire more slowly during growth periods, which limits their contribution to employment dynamics in expansion phases. And the mechanisms of inter-cooperative solidarity, like those the PERTE seeks to build, remain untested bets at large scale.

These limits do not disqualify the model. They define its scope of effectiveness: the cooperative is structurally better adapted to sectors where the long-term relationship between workers and the means of production is a real competitive advantage. Agriculture, personal services, certain segments of manufacturing industry, part of digital services. It is not a universal answer. But as automation will touch precisely the sectors where it is already strong, its resilience in the face of technological shocks is the right question to ask, and available data suggests it is superior to that of the classical model.

What France Could Decide in the Next Eighteen Months

The coming months offer several concrete entry points. The revision of the Pacte Law, which had introduced the notion of corporate purpose in corporate law, could be an opportunity to go further in terms of shared governance. The transposition of European directives on corporate sustainability creates a regulatory window. And the rising prominence of the debate on value sharing, relaunched by 2023 social negotiations, provides a favorable political context.

What the south European laboratory teaches concretely is that the decisive lever is not the law but financing. Italy and Spain have built dedicated financial infrastructures, not just legal frameworks. The question for France is therefore whether the Banque des Territoires or the Public Investment Bank could deploy a structured program, amounting to several hundred million euros over three to five years, to develop the financing, training and transfer tools lacking in the French cooperative sector.

As the experience of Stockholm on investments in service infrastructure showed in another domain, it is rarely ideas that are lacking, it is the will to structurally finance what produces diffuse and long-term effects rather than immediate announcements. The cooperative does not make headlines. It makes resilience.

Sources

  1. OECD, Social Economy in Europe – Italy (2023): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/social-economy-in-europe_12970cca-en/italy_b59ff4e5-en.html
  2. CECOP – European Confederation of Industrial and Service Cooperatives: https://www.cecop.coop
  3. General Confederation of SCOPs, sectoral data 2023: no guaranteed URL, viewable on les.scop.coop
  4. Legacoop, Rapporto sull’economia cooperativa in Emilia-Romagna, regional data
  5. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress (PublicAffairs, 2023)
  6. Government of Spain, PERTE for Social Economy 2023-2026, Ministry of Labor and Social Economy
  7. International Review of the Social Economy (RECMA), comparative studies cooperatives-classical enterprises 2008-2013
  8. European Federation of Ethical and Alternative Banks (FEBEA), impact investing data 2020-2022
  9. RECMA n°323 – Alliance of Italian Cooperatives: http://www.recma.org/sites/default/files/recma323_2012_034041.pdf
  10. Spanish Government – PERTE Social Economy: https://www.elplural.com/economia/gobierno-aprueba-perte-economia-social-cuidados-808-millones-hasta-2026_290917102
  11. Fondo Italiano d’Investimento / Human Foundation – Impact Investing Italy and Europe: https://www.fondoitaliano.it/en/fondo-italiano-dinvestimento-and-human-foundation-the-impact-investing-market-in-europe-is-worth-e230-billion/
  12. CG Scop – Key Figures 2024: https://www.les-scop.coop/chiffres-cles-2024
  13. Coop FR – Overview of Cooperative Enterprises 2024: https://www.entreprises.coop/system/files/inline-files/1.Panoramacoop2024-HDweb_1.pdf
  14. CEPAG – Focus Emilia-Romagna and Cooperatives (2018): https://www.cepag.be/sites/default/files/publications/analyse_cepag_-oct_2018-_cooperatives_en_italie_0.pdf
  15. ICA – Marcora Law 1985: https://ica.coop/fr/presse/actualites/loi-marcora-soutient-rachat-dentreprise-travailleurs-trente-ans
  16. Acemoglu & Johnson – Power and Progress (review): https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/book-review-power-and-progress-our-thousand-year-struggle-over-technology-and-prosperity/
  17. Unipol – Official Corporate Profile: https://www.unipol.com/en/our-identity/corporate-profile
  18. Invest in Emilia-Romagna – GDP per Capita: https://www.investinemiliaromagna.eu/emilia-romagna/competitiveness-and-internationalization