The 2014 edition of the World Co-operative Monitor Report aimed to collect economic and social data for 2012 on the largest co-operatives around the world. The data obtained through the questionnaire are still limited. Most of the data collected are economic in nature and come from lists and databases of national or international federations.

These data were integrated with other economic data relating to European co-operatives with turnover of above $100 million in 2012 and extracted from the Amadeus database of Bureau van Dijk. For this reason, the analyses presented in the 2014 report are purely economic and define the largest co-operatives and mutual organizations in the world in terms of turnover.

Data were collected on 1,926 co-operatives from sixty-five countries (see figure 1 below) with a total turnover of USD$2,623.1 billion in 2012.

To measure the economic dimension relative to the wealth of the country in which the organization operates, rather than in absolute terms, the ratio between the turnover of the co-operative and the country's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was calculated. The ratio turnover on GDP is not proposed to compute the contribution of each co-operative to the national GDP, but instead represents a first attempt to relate the turnover of the co-operative to the wealth of the country in which it operates. The GDP and GDP per capita in fact have different meanings: the GDP is the overall output of all the final goods and services produced within a country during one year, whereas the GDP per capita measures the purchasing power of an economy in an internationally comparable way. Therefore, the ratio turnover on GDP per capita measures the turnover of a co-operative in units of the purchasing power of an economy, in an internationally comparable way.

The map in figure 2 shows the 300 largest co-operatives and mutuals in the world in terms of turnover. The 300 largest co-operatives in terms of turnover compared with GDP per capita are shown in figure 3.

Figure 1. Co-operatives in the World Co-operative Monitor Database by country (2012)

Figure 2. The 300 largest co-operatives and mutuals in the world by turnover (2012)

Figure 3. The 300 largest co-operatives and mutuals in the world by turnover in GDP per capita (2012)