METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ENSURING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ORGANIZATION OF CONSUMER COOPERATION IN THE RURAL SERVICES MARKET

The sustainability of consumer cooperation is an important qualitative characteristic of the cooperative system, the features of which include a non-commercial nature, a social orientation to meet the needs of shareholders, and the predominant functioning in rural areas. Social responsibility is one of the indicators of competitiveness of consumer cooperation organizations, which allows us to consider social and economic sustainability as a significant type of sustainability. In order to form a strategy for ensuring the sustainability of consumer cooperation in the rural services market, it is important to have methodological tools that allow us to assess the level of socio-economic sustainability of consumer cooperation in the rural segment of the market, based on the structuring of the system of indicators of social responsibility of consumer cooperation. The proposed methodology takes into account the specifics of consumer cooperation activities and allows for assessing sustainability in general for the consumer cooperation system and for individual economic entities at the regional and local levels. During the implementation of the presented methodological approach, the level of ensuring social and economic sustainability of Novosibirsk regional consumer union was determined (in the amount of 93.6% of the target level), and a particularly important direction for ensuring sustainability of consumer cooperation social responsibility was identified - improving the standard of living of the rural population, among the factors significantly influenced by the cost of consumer cooperation services per person. The significance of the proposed approach lies in the possibility of its application to substantiate decisions on the interaction of consumer cooperation organizations operating in rural areas and focused on rural residents with local authorities in order to develop the rural services market.