Lubor Lacina

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.