농협 합병의 적정규모에 관한 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to suggest a feasible plan and strategy for mergers among agricultural cooperatives by analyzing the current status of mergers and responding to the claim that mergers are much needed by agricultural cooperatives to adapt to the rapidly changing management environment surrounding agriculture and agricultural cooperatives, particularly as multi-lateral and bi-lateral free trade agreements, known as WTOs and FTAs, have advanced. In particular, the research focuses on how to determine the most efficient merger size. This research surveyed all agricultural cooperatives across the nation, as of 2014, using the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) method. The input factors were the number of members, equity capital, and management expense, while the output factors were the turnover of marketing business, turnover of financial business, and the gross profit on sales. As a result of DEA, we reached the conclusion that the ideal scale of a merger consists of 4,000 individual members or more, KRW of 400 billion or more of financial turnover, and KRW of 60 billion or more marketing turnover. There are many cooperatives that show increasing returns when each merger consists of up to three cooperatives. Many cooperatives show increasing returns when each merger consists of up to three cooperatives, which reflects the trend that pure technical efficiency is rising. Furthermore, the ideal size of a merger of agricultural cooperatives is a necessary condition for efficiency to realize the vision of offering real benefits to member farmers. Thus, this research also comes up with step-by-step strategies for mergers, based on their ideal size, re-evaluating the objectives brought up by mergers. At the same time, this research proposes expanding a training for strong internal organization and systemizededucation to enhance watered-down solidarity between merged cooperatives and their membership, as mergers spread out from small units to large ones.