The cooperative form of the organization has been an important option for the development of small organizations. However, as well as it occurs in other organizations, the cooperatives need to be evaluated using the category of efficiency to evaluate how was his activities performance. The efficiency evaluation is very important for these categories of organizations because the cooperatives own an administration that should attend the needs to yours several cooperated. In this work was accomplished the application of the denominated method Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate the performance of rural credit cooperatives of São Paulo state. The accomplished study show that the cooperatives that had larger resources managed was able to obtain better performance, concerning your operation goal (credit concession). One of the most important results, evidenced in the study, was that the cooperatives that had larger resources managed obtained better efficiency rates when considered the total relation assets and administrative expenses relatively to the volume of conceded credit. The results obtained show that the DEA can be an interesting alternative option for evaluation performance.
data envelopment analysis; performance; credit cooperatives
