META-ANALYSIS COMBINING CLUSTER ANALYSIS AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING – CATEGORISATION OF SIGNS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES´ INSOLVENCY

Insolvency belongs to the basic indicators representing financial situation of practically all enterprises. In spite of the fact that promising development of several macroeconomic indicators suggests that economy as a whole have overcome the economic crisis and since 2010 its recovery clearly occurs, the increase of unpaid liabilities still persists. In this paper we performed the analysis of data indicating insolvency of the EU countries for year 2012. Within our statistical meta-analysis, we compare multiple methodological approaches: variants of agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis; outputs of method k-means; k-medoids; and fuzzy c-means. The obtained results are qualitatively compliant with multidimensional scaling. Following the structure of their insolvency indicators, the countries were divided into three basic groups. The obtained classification is quantitatively compliant with current macroeconomic idea about gravity of debt crisis in various EU countries.