Financial Situation of Municipally Owned Corporations. Evidence from the Slovak Republic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52152/23.2.178-204(2025)Keywords:
municipally owned corporations, equity, financial indicators, impending bankruptcy, dividendsAbstract
Local bureaucracies leave the delivery of market-like services to the corporations they set up. We analyse the financial situation of 22 municipally owned corporations (MOCs) in full ownership of eight main regional cities in the Slovak Republic. MOCs are divided in the article into four groups according to their activities: Urban transport, Waste collection, Real estate management and Engineering activities. We calculate and compare the financial indicators of MOCs with the median values of the indicators of the relevant sectors for each of the four analysed groups of corporations. We establish research questions and hypotheses in which we find out whether the achieved values of the indicators do not differ significantly from the median values of the sectors. We evaluated the differences using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test for two dependent samples. We also assessed whether MOCs do not predominantly achieve negative equity. Also, whether they are not at risk of bankruptcy and whether they pay dividends.
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