Methodology
Methods
This platform aligns with the public data sources commonly used by the international cooperative research community and emphasises reproducibility: every chart should be traceable to an original table or an official PDF/webpage. The ICA news aggregation (see "ICA newsroom") indexes only public HTML and does not alter the original text; for academic citation, please use the original ICA links.
Source priority
- World Cooperative Monitor(a joint project of Euricse / ICA / the Boston College Center): structured tables on the Top 300, sector and country distribution, employment and membership.
- International Cooperative Alliance: principles, definitional material, policy advocacy and news narratives; country and regional network descriptions.
- World Bank Open Data: GDP, population and a number of macroeconomic reference series; note revision years and currency units.
Entity and sector classification
WCM provides a clear methodological account of the top-tier reporting entity and consolidation boundary for a "cooperative group"; sector classification follows WCM's existing definitions (for example, agriculture & food includes a fisheries sub-category). Where this site derives secondary labels (such as a "climate-related" topic tag), a separate rule set and manual spot-check rate will be defined in an appendix to avoid conflating them with the official classification.
Limitations and bias
- Rankings favour large, auditable reporting entities and understate small and medium cooperatives and informal-sector data.
- Cross-border revenue comparisons are sensitive to exchange rates and the price-reference year; the platform defaults to showing nominal US-dollar values with the conversion source noted.
- Country-level GDP and revenue ratios cannot by themselves support a stronger claim such as "the cooperative sector's share of the labour force."
- ICA news is advocacy and communications content, not equivalent to peer-reviewed empirical research.