Underlying Greece's public debt crisis is a fundamental economic problem: its lack of international competitiveness. While in the short term the debt crisis must be solved, in the long term the economic perspective of the country will depend on whether it will succeed in developing competitive...

This article presents an analysis of the impact of virtualization process on competitiveness of small and medium sized firms. The developed methodology for measuring the level of organizational virtualness has been effectively applied to a wide range of businesses, both large and the smallest...

R&D investment and growth in SMEs and large firms relate in a complex way. This paper analyses what role persistence of innovation output plays in shaping that relationship. We apply a vector auto-regression model to Finnish firm-level data and summarize the lead–lag relationship and complex...

The diffusion of internal rating systems changes the scenario of the financial strategy adopted by firms. The objective of the work consists of understanding how firms can respond to increasingly complex strategies that require an operative and managerial maturity, by building an optimum...

The New Accord on Capital, known as Basel II, has induced a progressive harmonization of evaluation processes on credit risk merit in Italy. The present work analyzes the effect of Basel II on the basis of the definition of default that will come into effect at the end of the transition period....

The public guarantee programs set by policy makers are taking an increasing importance in support access to credit for SMEs. We intend to verify the main default drivers of operations assisted by the Central Guarantee Fund (CGF), in order to identify policies for improving its economic...

The paper analyses the industrial system of the North-West area in Italy, the declining of its large companies and the rising of local SMEs. This long process was created by the declining of the State-owned large companies, the emerging of a new generation of entrepreneurship, the general shift...

Recent academic articles point to an increased vagueness and overlap in concepts related to business ethics and corporate responsibility. Further, the perception of these notions can differ in the small-business world from the original academic definitions. This article focuses on the cognition...