Resumen de Financial reporting for cooperatives: a literature review

Fernando Polo Garrido, Sergio Marí Vidal

• Cooperatives are a different business entity, considered hybrid organisations that combine economic and social purposes. They are democratically managed organisations, owned by the members, who also fulfil the role of  uppliers, workers, or customers. The fact that standard setters take the investor-owned firm as a model to develop accounting standards produces recurrent unfitness of these standards regarding cooperatives. We have developed a comprehensive literature review to shed light on the work done to date, detect gaps, and suggest future lines of research. Equity-liability distinction is the most studied topic, normative-critical methodology is the most applied, and many specific topics in cooperatives are unaddressed, such as business combinations, transactions with  members, performance, comparative studies between countries, etc. Cooperative accounting has contributed advances to the accounting discipline, among others, showing that the concept of ownership is multidimensional and depends on the type of enterprise. It has provided methodological developments to empirically test whether the economic substance of shares is liabilities or equity, and it has shown that some decisions by accounting regulators have been ineffective.The research is perceived as a reaction to issued  accounting standards, and as such, additional research on the process of issuing accounting standards and proactive research is advocated.