Title: National, regional or industrial explanation for firms' deaths in the European Union since 2010 until 2014 - a shift-share application

Authors: Kseniia Shinkarenko; Alcina Nunes; Tatiana Khvatova

Addresses: Instituto Politécnico de Bragança and Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal ' Applied Management Research Unit (UNIAG), Institute Polytechnic of Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão, Office 61, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal ' Department of Management, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, St. Petersburg, Russia

Abstract: The concept of business closure is one of the most important in business demography. Traditionally, firms' closure has been associated with regional factors. Still, a region can have different from the nation aggregate rate of activity because it has a different mix of industries and/or because it enjoys comparatively more favourable local conditions. Thus, business closure may be driven by the business cycle, industrial composition as well as a regional advantage. So, the present work is dedicated to analyse the factors that may drive business closure in European Union countries between 2010 and 2014, and to find out which of them has/have been the most important one(s). For this purpose, a shift-share decomposition analysis of business closure will be applied. The results proved that regional component had the highest impact on firms' deaths during the investigated period of time for almost all countries included in the analysis.

Keywords: business demography; firm deaths; firm closure; shift-share decomposition analysis; national component; industrial component; regional component; manufacturing; services; construction; European Union.

DOI: 10.1504/GBER.2019.099399

Global Business and Economics Review, 2019 Vol.21 No.3/4, pp.346 - 361

Received: 05 Oct 2017
Accepted: 01 Mar 2018
Published online: 01 May 2019 *

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