A growing number of predicting corporate failure models has emerged since 60s. Economic and social consequences of business failure can be dramatic, thus it is not surprise that the issue has been of growing interest in academic research as well as in business context. The main purpose of this study is to compare the predictive ability of five developed models based on three statistical techniques (Discriminant Analysis, Logit and Probit ) and two models based on Artificial Intelligence (Neural Networks and Rough Sets). The five models were employed to a dataset of 420 non-bankrupt firms and 125 bankrupt firms belonging to the textile and clothing industry, over the period 2003-09. Results show that all the models performed well, with an overall correct classification level higher than 90%, and a type II error always less than 2%. The type I error increases as we move away from the year prior to failure. Our models contribute to the discussion of corporate financial distress causes. Moreover it can be used to assist decisions of creditors, investors and auditors. Additionally, this research can be of great contribution to devisers of national economic policies that aim to reduce industrial unemployment.

Understanding business failure within the transport industry is crucial for formulating an effective competitive policy. Acknowledging the pivotal role of financial stability as a cornerstone of sustainability, this study undertakes a comparative investigation between statistical models forecasting business failure and artificial intelligence-based models within the context of the transport sector. The analysis spans the temporal period from 2014 to 2021 and encompasses a dataset of 4866 companies from four South European countries: Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. The models created were linear support vector machines (L-SVMs), kernel support vector machines (K-SVMs), k-nearest neighbors (k-NNs), logistic regression (LR), decision trees (DTs), random forests (RFs), extremely random forests (ERFs), AdaBoost, and neural networks (NNs). The models were implemented in Python using the scikit-learn package. The results revealed that most models exhibited high precision and accuracy, ranging from 71% to 73%, with the ERF model outperforming others in both predictive capacity and accuracy. It was also observed that artificial intelligence-based models outperformed statistical models in predicting business failure, with particular emphasis on the AdaBoost and ERF models. Thus, we conclude that the results confirm the hypothesis that the artificial intelligence models were superior in all metrics compared to the results obtained by logistic regression.

Textile and tourism sectors are two important industries in the Portuguese economy. However, its high exposure to both internal and international economic volatility make the companies operating in these economic sectors particularly vulnerable to economic crises, such as the ones which have been impacting Portugal and the European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sectors, during the period 2005-2009. The findings suggest that age has a major impact on the risk of failure, rather than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and ultimately depends on the age of the company. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3p471