Jan Vavřina

Economic crisis in EU: impact on Greek and Irish enterprises according its size and sector

Abstract European corporate have been strongly influenced by the recent economic crisis. Financial statements of businesses provide clear evidence of economic downturns impact on corporate finance. The objective of this article is to explore similarities/dissimilarities among development of Greek and Irish corporates’ finance in different industries using cluster analysis and subjective mapping based on microeconomic data from Amadeus database. Authors selected Greek and Ireland, because they represent countries from EU periphery, which has been strongly negatively influenced by economic crisis. However author believes that the structural differences will lead over the time in faster recovery of Irish businesses in contrast to the Greek one. The database Amadeus of Bureau van Dijk was used as the primal source of harmonized corporate financial statements. The dataset consists of more than 3,500 businesses, which were identified as those with either 3 year continuous increase or decrease of their total employed capitals profitability. Such a development authors consider as a sorting criterion of financially well/badly performing companies. For the purpose of analysis authors analyse the data series three years of crisis (2008, 2009 and 2010). There is another important supplementary criterions; these are NACE revision 2 categorization of economic activities and economic size of company, measured by its turnover, amount of assets and number of employees. In the study we use the cluster analysis to detect some basic patterns and trends in business sector in terms of homogeneity within dataset. The single correspondence analysis method was employed for the purpose of the subjective mapping. Based on the results of conducted analysis authors provide explanatory outlook over similarities/dissimilarities among sectors.

Profitability of foodstuff processing companies in V4 countries during the 2008-2012 economic crisis

Food processing companies in the members of the Visegrad Group have had similar conditions to sustain and develop their business activities since entering the single European market in 2004. It is necessary above all to stress the levelling instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy within the context of negative external impacts, which diminish in relation to the economic status of businesses, specifically SMEs. The objective of this paper is to identify similarities and differences in the profitability of foodstuff producers from the Visegrad countries during the global economic crisis between 2008 and 2012. The paper uses financial and non-financial factors and employs a multiple correspondence analysis approach. Corporate financial data for the companies was sourced from the Amadeus of Bureau van Dijk database for 2008-2012. Non-financial factors within the sample of business entities include economic size and residence. The findings reveal similarities in corporate profitability among observed countries of residence and other distinctive factors.

Key Aspects of Competitiveness: Focus on European Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Business entities’ competitiveness can be derived from lower costs and consequently from lower prices or it can be derived from higher-quality products and services. A company’s competitiveness on both price and quality is inevitably related to innovation. The problem area of competitiveness has gradually broadened from the corporate level and thus innovations have become an inevitable aspect of national economies and have achieved rising importance. The European policy’s primary interest in overtaking the competitiveness of the world’s most-developed economies arises out of the Lisbon Strategy for growth and jobs. To some extent, innovations are the essential prerequisite for sustaining the viability and competitiveness of business entities across their economic size categories. Nevertheless, there are both objective and subjective factors that either limit corporations’ innovation potential or even eliminate their innovation activities. These factors are defined as barriers to innovation. Almost all of the studies on barriers to innovation consistently highlight one barrier or more specifically, a group of barriers—i.e., financial barriers—as the most serious. National governments spend huge amounts of money to improve countries’ competitiveness by providing SMEs with access to financial resources, which are intended to be the key aspect of domestic companies’ competitiveness. The question is whether these investments to “national innovativeness” have the intended effect, whereas the results of research on innovative performance have proven that profits are preserved in enterprises and innovations are financed, particularly from internal financial resources.