Cooperative Infrastructure Sharing for Food-Industry Efficiency

This article designs and formalises a cooperative infrastructure-sharing mechanism for raising economic efficiency in food-manufacturing industries characterised by a fragmented, small-firm structure. The purpose of the study is to resolve three interlocking contradictions that prevent rising resource and investment inflows from translating into efficiency gains: a decreasing-returns-to-scale regime in which neither individual expansion nor continued fragmentation improves returns; a weak capital elasticity of output despite rapidly growing investment; and a declining technology-absorption rate despite accelerating equipment imports. Drawing on transaction-cost economics, the theory of institutions, hybrid governance forms, and cluster theory, the mechanism is built as a two-layer structure — a technological process chain and a governance layer of three prioritised blocks (technology absorption, shared cooperative infrastructure, and investment redirection) — closed by a monitoring–deviation–reallocation feedback loop. A minimum-membership condition for shared facilities, a loss-reduction valuation formula, an impact-weighted resource-allocation rule, and a target-achievement gain formula are derived to make the mechanism's blocks measurable and auditable rather than descriptive. Illustrative calibration shows that a cooperative cold-storage or testing facility becomes economical once the number of participating firms exceeds a threshold determined by the ratio of shared to standalone facility costs, and that closing the gap between current and best-practice efficiency levels can recover a substantial share of currently wasted resources without any net increase in resource inflow. The findings offer manufacturing-policy makers a practical, verifiable alternative to firm-level subsidy programmes that treat scale, technology, and investment problems in isolation.

Food industry, organisational-economic mechanism, shared infrastructure

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