EVALUATION OF THE FACTORS INFLUENCING BUSINESS BANKRUPTCY RISK IN POLAND

Abstract

This article is devoted to the issue of assessing the causes of businessfailure. The presented studies answer two research questions – what are the causes of corporate bankruptcies in Poland and how to more effectively predict the scale of bankruptcies in the country. The author has conducted a study to analyze the specific endogenous and exogenous causes of company bankruptcy depending on the type of the bankruptcy with consideration of the three different phases of the crisis in enterprises. The research is based on 185 companies(60 bankrupt and 125 non-bankrupt firms) listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. For each company the author has calculated 14 different financial ratios for each of the six years before classifying the firm as bankrupt or non-bankrupt. The author has also done research to identify specific macroeconomic variables affecting the bankruptcy process of the companies in Poland. This provided specification of the manner and how strongly the various factors affect the quantity and intensity of bankruptcy applications in this region of Europe. Additionally, with the use of selected macroeconomic variables the author programmed a fuzzy logic model to forecast the general intensity of bankruptcies in Poland. This study is the first attempt at using fuzzy logic to predict the risk of bankruptcy in a macro aspect. The results demonstrate the great potential of this method. The received effectiveness of the fuzzy logic model is at the level of 84%.