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competing with the longer established position of the "state" and the quasi "state"
sector in the market place.
The sectors which are open to the market and deregulated are the sectors in which
the co-operative organisation has lost market share. As in the south, both before and
after 1974, each village had a co-operative grocer (as the population did not have
enough capital for the invisible hand to necessarily provide one). Consumers coopératives
(retailers) were set up, buying goods from co-operative wholesale
markets (in the Turkish-Cypriot community they have always been divisions of the
Co-operative Central Bank). While co-operative wholesale markets still exist,
increasingly village co-operative stores have closed in the north (as in the south),
because compétition from the private sector has recently proved irrésistible. Some
of the population has had enough capital to provide retail services more efficiently
than co-operative institutions, and more of the population have more disposable
income to sustain compétition in the wholesale and retail sectors. ïn the domestic
shoe industry too, co-operative production cannot compete with antiquated but deregulated
private domestic production. Here quasi-public enterprise is battered by
both sides: greater économies of scale from overseas producers and the de-regulated
labour market of small domestic cobblers' workshops. Ultimately when controls
have been removed, the private sector has been attracted by simple profits, and has
recently consistently out performed co-operative organisations in retailing, supply
and even production 83 . Seemingly, despite the lack of a political settlement, where
once there were missing markets, which had to be regulated and controlled by state
and quasi-state institutions, markets have arisen. Whether as a conséquence of
excessive bureaucracy, crowding out or of security and political considérations, the
private sector has played a small but increasing rôle in the development of a
83 Interview with Suleyman Kiryagdi, General Co-ordinator & Acting Secretary and General Manager
of the Cyprus Turkish Co-operative Central Bank, 20-21//04/95.
208