Small and Medium Sized Firms’ Competitiveness and Territorial Characteristics by using a MLR approach

Theodore Metaxas and Marie-Noëlle Duquenne ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates the importance of territorial characteristics on small and medium-sized firms’ (SMEs) competitiveness. The analysis is based on primary data collected through questionnaires from 374 firms located in Bari (Italy), Varna (Bulgaria) and Thessaloniki (Greece). These firms operate in the sectors of industry, commerce and services. Through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), the contribution of a large set of territorial characteristics has been assessed allowing us to extract some important and comprehensive factors for firms’ competitiveness. Finally we implemented a multinomial logistic regression (MLR) in which the degree of firms’ competitiveness (Low, Medium, High) is specified as a function of the territorial components identified through EFA. Three categories of firms’ competitiveness are examined: competitiveness at national level, competitiveness against South-Eastern firms as well as North-Western firms. The MLR has been applied to all firms as well as to each one of the three sectors of activity. The results of the analysis confirm that the contribution of each major territorial component is largely conditioned by the type of competitiveness examined as well as the sector of activity.

Keywords: Firms’ competitiveness; Territorial characteristics; Exploratory Factor Analysis; Multinomial Logistic Regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 R11 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/66848/1/MPRA_paper_66848.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:66848

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().