Designing a Cooperatives Transparency Index in Iran

Although transparency literature is mainly concentrated on government transparency, but it has gone far beyond it and has been extended to private companies, cooperatives, NGOs and charities. The field of cooperatives is one of the fields in which transparency has entered in recent decades in the form of concepts such as "corporate governance", "corporate transparency" and "open corporate data". The aim of this research is to design an index to measure transparency in cooperatives. This qualitative research has been conducted using documentary studies, interviews with 45 experts and focus group. The statistical population of the study includes all experts and activists in the field of cooperation, including managers and government experts, members of unions and chambers, and members of cooperatives. Cooperative Transparency Index (CTI) consists of 6 dimensions and 39 items. In addition to measuring the level of transparency in cooperatives (in the range of 0 to 100), this index determines the optimum or desired level of transparency, separately for "each user in each item", "each item", "each dimension" and "final amount of Index". Finally, some policy recommendations have been proposed to promote transparency in the cooperative sector, including participation of major actors in cooperative sector, reduction of bureaucratic complexities and education of cooperatives.