A set of data from a survey of 285 small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises from the three regions of Ukraine with the highest concentration of SMEs is used to study the determinants of trust in the contract-enforcing powers of commercial courts and its impact on the performance of firms.
The paper examines empirically the effect of ownership structure on corporate governance and performance of privatised enterprises in transition. The data are taken from a survey conducted in 2001 on 202 medium-sized and large firms in Ukraine for the period 1998 - 2000.
Economic transition is tightly connected with the development of private sector and entrepreneurship, where small enterprises (SEs) play an important role. Though the development of small business in Ukraine attracted a lot of attention, its regional differences as well as the factors that are behind them were not yet thoroughly investigated.
There is a widely held belief that fierce competition improves the efficiency of production, which is clearly an extrapolation of the well-established fact that competition has a positive influence on efficient resource allocation. The intuition, which leads to this conclusion is related to the existence of a positive rent in monopolized markets and the corresponding possibilities for slack by managers and employees.
For a set of data from a survey of middle-sized and large industrial enterprise in Ukraine after privatisation regression equations are estimated that explain the response of restructuring and performance indicators to ownership structures, competitive pressure, hardening budget constraints and changes in human capital.
Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in both developed and transition countries. Recent studies provide evidence of an increasing role for the SME sector in the global economy, though its share in GDP and in employment varies from country to country.
On the micro-economic level international integration means that enterprises should move in a direction which is characteristic of companies participating in a market economy, i.e. they should undertake the necessary restructuring measures and participate in international trade.