Abstract:

Many payments are made in business transactions not only between businesses but also between businesses and public authorities much later than agreed. Every year in Europe and the world, thousands of businesses fail because of late payments. Delay payments make a rapid chain reaction in business, when a lack of liquidity forces them to resort to austerity measures that, of course, nobody knows. Delayed payments affect not only business liquidity, but the increasing rate of bad debts hinders planned growth, increases administrative and financial burdens. In the case of businesses and customers from different Member States, they also negatively affect the cross-border trade itself. All of this, in the end, has a negative impact on the entire European economy. The willingness of Slovak companies to provide business loans to their business partners is largely determined by the development of payment discipline, so we decided to analyse the payment discipline using the aggregation method k-means on a sample of 9,067 selected Slovak companies.