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The purpose of this study is to answer the research question: How do cooperative organizations perform when created by government fiat in an emerging market? Through the use of institutional and agency theory, this paper presents a comparative analysis of the efficiency of the cooperative form of organization and investor-owned firms-investigating how the social–political structures in a community affect the efficiency of cooperatives vis-à-vis investor-owned firms. This paper also attempts to offer a better understanding of how government quality and organizational size influence performance outcomes between different organizational forms specifically in the Philippines.

The empirical analysis of this study was conducted among electric distribution utilities in the Philippines. Firm-level data was generated for 133 distributors, consisting of 119 electric cooperatives and 14 investor-owned companies. Panel data regressions were ran to test all hypotheses.

Cooperative organizations operate at a less efficient rate than investor-owned firms in the Philippines, even when controlling for firm-specific factors such as size, customer density and profitability. In addition, the efficiency of these cooperative organizations is more strongly influenced by the quality of the local government than investor-owned firms.

Positive externalities generated by the propagation of cooperatives on local communities may be based primarily on our understanding of how cooperatives have functioned largely in western contexts. Within the context of Southeast Asia, where national socio-political structures may be more dysfunctional, this paper observes that there is an equivalent negative externality caused by the tendency of cooperatives to replicate the political mismanagement of the community around it.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the drug use and criminal justice factors related to hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibody reactivity among rural women in the USA recruited from local jails.

Analyses included 277 women with a history of injection drug use from three rural jails in Kentucky. Participants completed health and drug use questionnaires and received antibody testing for HCV.

The majority of women tested reactive to the HCV antibody (69 percent). Reactivity was associated with risk factors, such as unsterile needle use. Criminal justice variables, including an increased likelihood of prison incarceration, an earlier age of first arrest, and a longer incarceration history, were associated with HCV reactive tests. Participants also endorsed several barriers to seeking healthcare before entering jail that were more prevalent in women testing HCV reactive regardless of HCV status awareness before entering jail.

Injection and high-risk sharing practices as well as criminal justice factors were significantly associated with HCV reactivity. Future research and practice could focus on opportunities for linkages to HCV treatment during incarceration as well as during community re-entry to help overcome real or perceived treatment barriers. The current study highlights the importance of the criminal justice system as a non-traditional, real-world setting to examine drug use and related health consequences such as HCV by describing the association of high-risk drug use and criminal justice consequences with HCV among rural women recruited from local jails.