Perspectiva histórica del cooperativismo de crédito agrícola en Canarias

Two savings banks are currently active in the Canary Isles: Caja Rural de Tenerife and Caja Rural de Canarias, and these are furthermore the only two loan co-operatives in the region. And as they are also virtually the only loan co-operatives that have been successful, to talk about the economic trajectory followed by the two rural savings banks is equivalent to dealing with the whole of co-operative agricultural credit in the Canary Isles. This is the objective of this paper; to analyse the savings banks’ evolution. In the first section we look at when and why the agrarian co-operative societies emerge in Europe and Spain, while in the second part we look at the Canary Isles case in particular. The third and fourth sections deal with evolution of leading economic aggregates, respectively up to 1987 and later years.