Acceptance of the Social Economy concept and Identification of homogeneous groups in Latin American and European countries

Globalization and new technologies generate sources of wealth that allow the transformation of social, economic and institutional structures through the production of goods and services. These actions have a positive effect for society when they favor the distribution of benefits over individual enrichment. The growing importance of social economy as an alternative for the achievement of local development has generated the interest of public institutions, the civil society and the scientific community. The objective of this research was twofold: Firstly, it aimed at analyzing the indicators of the acceptance of the social economy concept by public authorities, social economy companies and the academic-scientific world of different countries from Latin America and Europe. Secondly, it intended to identify homogeneous groups of the variables: social economy companies and jobs, using Ward's method of hierarchical cluster analysis. To this end, data from 17 countries from Latin America and 27 from Europe was studied. This data was obtained from different databases and reports from the 2010-2012 period. The countries with the greatest acceptance of the concept of social economy are those of Europe, which, unlike Latin American countries, construct larger conglomerates, with respect to the number of social economy enterprises and jobs. The countries of Latin America require greater efforts to make social economy a strategic part of local development consolidation, as it is the case in European countries.