ACTA SCIENTIARUM POLONORUM - SGGW

Business demography issues and empirical research on dynamics of enterprises’... 71comparisons between countries. In this paper a birth rate and death rate as measures ofdynamics are differentiated following Eurostat.Analyses of business demography are usually presented in the following subjects:number of births and birth rates; number of deaths and death rate; survival rates; influenceon employment.The classifications used in comparisons are: company size measured by the number ofpeople employed; sector of enterprise activity; geographical situation (EU, new membersand candidate countries).According to such classifications and divisions, the results for Poland in the period1997–2009 are presented in this paper. Data for 2010 are not available yet.In this study the analyses of enterprise birth and death processes are based on dataconcerning private sector only. Data for public sector was excluded. Comparative analysesinvolving the EU countries are limited to business sector and cover PKD sectors(Polish Classification of Activities) such as C–K without J – financial services and sectionsM-O.Indicators in sector analysis concern classification encompassing four groups of activities(according to Eurostat):– Industry (Sections C–E),– Construction (Sections F),– Services (Sections G–K),– Other services (Sections’ M–O).Analyses with regard to the size of enterprise measured by the number of employeesare not presented due to data limitations.PROCESS OF ENTERPRISES’ BIRTHS IN YEARS 1997–2009For the presentation of changes in the process of enterprise births in Poland the birthrate was used. The birth rate is calculated as the proportion of newly registered firms inthe reference year to the mean number of active enterprises in the reference year in percent(see formula 1). The number of active enterprises was taken from estimations madeby Chmiel [Chmiel 1997, 1999, 2004]. The estimations covered the period 1993–2002.For the years 2003–2009 the number of active enterprises was assumed to be at the levelof ca. 54% of all registered enterprises. 54% is the mean value of the proportion of activeto registered enterprises from the years 2000–2002 (last available years from Chmiel’sestimations). Real values of calculated rates should be also verified as not all newly registerfirms start their activity immediately after registration. Such corrections require additionalresearch (unavailable at this moment). Assuming that the proportion of reallyactive start-ups is stable, some conclusions about the tempo and direction of changes canbe drawn based on the ratio presented in Figure 1 (data from CSO, 2010).In the years 1997–2009 the birth rate dropped from over 25% to the level of 15%. In2002–2005 the rate level was stable and remained slightly above 15%. In the referenceyear in that period out of 100 active enterprises 15 new firms were born.Oeconomia 10 (1) 2011