The aim of this research was to explore one of the most intriguing dimensions of every firm’s business—its performance. Aside from analysing the influence of industry’s characteristics on the firm’s performance, the authors addressed the characteristics of dynamic capabilities and their role in contribution to the firm’s ultimate success. The analysis was conducted on a sample of 118 small Croatian manufacturing companies. The application of the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) approach revealed a statistically significant influence of both the industry’s characteristics (represented by Porter’s five forces framework) and dynamic capabilities (based on Teece’s theory) on the firm’s performance, where the influence of dynamic capabilities is proven to be larger than that of the industry.

Although a relatively large number of studies have been focused on evaluating the efficiency of insurance companies from different aspects, analysis of factors that determine the achieved level of insurers’ efficiency is still in their inception. Whi...

Accession of Croatia to the EU brought legal, regulatory and market changes for the insurance companies. The question that arises is whether the new environment in which the companies operate has improved their efficiency. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to separately estimate the efficiency of non-life and life insurance industry in Croatia and to compare it through the period before (2009-2012) and after (2013-2018) Croatian accession to the EU. The research is based on the Data Envelopment Analysis and the obtained results indicate an average increase in overall technical efficiency in both, non-life and life sector in period after Croatia’s accession to the EU. Still, this increase was not proved to be significant. Additionally, although increase in pure technical efficiency was significant in non-life sector, an insignificant slight decrease is recorded in life sector. Finally, insurers conducting (non)life business activities are mainly operating at increasing returns to scale.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute to the national economy in terms of employment, added value, knowledge generation, and innovation. However, their potential and in the case of economic downturns even their survival is affected by the difficulties in their access to external financing under acceptable terms and adequate timing and amount. In the case of asymmetric information problems, which make SMEs more sensitive to financial market imperfections, trade credit can be a valuable source of financing. In the European Union, trade credit is among the most relevant external funding sources and it is among the most important alternatives to financial intermediaries’ financing. However, there are substantial differences between the countries with respect to availability and use of trade credit. Therefore, this research examines determining (company-specific and country-specific) factors behind the use of trade credit as a financing source in Croatia. The empirical analysis is based on the data for 1,225 SMEs operating in Croatia in the period from 2008 to 2017 and is done using the panel data methodology. The findings confirm that firms’ characteristics, as well as the characteristics of financial, macroeconomic and legal environment in which the firms operate, influence the use of trade credit in SMEs in Croatia. The paper contributes to relatively scarce empirical evidence on the determinants of trade credit use by SMEs in South-East European countries.

During the pandemic, health care services have gained in importance. One of the ways used to finance these services is through voluntary private health insurance. Existing studies on the demand for voluntary private health insurance are based predominantly on the micro-economic level. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse the factors of demand at the macro-economic level. The analysis covers economic and demographic factors, the quality of the public health care system, risk aversion and the status of the population’s health. The empirical research is based on the databases of 29 European countries in the period from 2013 to 2017 and on the dynamic panel model. The results of the empirical analysis revealed that income, price, urbanization, health care system quality, risk aversion/education and self-perceived health are important determinants of demand for voluntary private health insurance in European countries.