This study explores the impact of a company’s financial flexibility on the effectiveness of its investments.The number of companies that have financial flexibility was calculated with the application of thespare debt capacity method. The research identifies the impact of financial flexibility on investment activity and on the level of suboptimal investments. The data from 1,736 companies in theAsian region, during the 2005-2015time period, are presented. The Asian region has unique institutional, economic and commercial environments that present a great basis for this paper. The results of the research reveal that financially flexible companies spend more on their investment expenditure and conduct more effective investment policiesby reducing the level of over- and underinvestment. Financial flexibility helps companies to make effective investments during a crisis period, but the difference in the flexibility between developed and developing countries and between large and small companies was not observed.

The article presents data on the corporate survival rate in Russia in 1991–2014. The empirical survey was based on a random sample with the average number of non-repeated observations (number of companies) for the survey each year equal to 75,958 (24,236 minimum and 126,953 maximum). The actual limiting mean error ∆p was 2.24% with 99% integrity. The survey methodology was based on a cross joining of various formal periods in the corporate life cycles (legal and business), which makes it possible to talk about a conventionally active time life of companies’ existence with a number of assumptions. The empirical survey values were grouped by Russian regions and industries according to the classifier and consolidated into a single database for analysing the corporate life cycle and their survival rate and searching for deviation dependencies in calculated parameters. Preliminary and incomplete figures were available in the paper entitled “Survival Rate and Lifecycle in Terms of Uncertainty: Review of Companies from Russia and Eastern Europe” (Kuzmin and Guseva, 2016) [3]. The further survey led to filtered processed data with clerical errors excluded. These particular values are available in the article. The survey intended to fill a fact-based gap in various fundamental surveys that involved matters of the corporate life cycle in Russia within the insufficient statistical framework. The data are of interest for an analysis of Russian entrepreneurship, assessment of the market development and incorporation risks in the current business environment. A further heuristic potential is achievable through an ability of forecasted changes in business demography and model building based on the representative data set.

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Abstract:Purpose: Offer an alternative method to assess operational performance of companies in transport infrastructure of a region by making a comparison between transaction costs. The method is supposed to be a cross-functional and possibly applied to an analysis of economic entities of a different order (country, region, sector, companies) while evaluating "viscosity" / complexity of the outside and the inside.Design/methodology/approach: The paper includes an analysis of various methodological approaches to assess a development level of the transport infrastructure in a region. Within the author's approach and for purposed of the research, an index of transaction capacity or the transactionalness index is proposed, which determines a level of transaction costs calculated against the cost of production and revenue. The approach is piloted using the region-wise infrastructure (the transport one in the example given). Third, the transactionalness level may say of uncertainty and risks. As an addition to theoretical and methodological aspects of transaction costs, the authors justify an approach to their size estimation, as well as their differentiation dividing them into two groups: those of a natural type and a background type. In a course of their discussion, the authors have concluded that there are such transaction costs in place, which are standard in a manner of speaking. Originality/value:There is a discussion whether it is scientifically reasonable to use an index of transactionalness. There are reasons for applicability of the alternative approach to assess operational performance of companies in transport infrastructure as an indicative criterion of favouring external conditions to execute exchange transactions. According to the authors, a high level of transactionalness is associated with a low development level of transport infrastructure in a region. This says that their competitiveness is specifically less.

Discussing the problem of economic sustainability, we are in general deal with life cycles and economic activity. Factors causing dynamics in entrepreneurial ventures, their duration and process rate depend on environmental conditions, including institutional, market, infrastructure, and resource aspects. A cumulative impact of all of these factors appears at a specific level of enterprise survival, which becomes a universal characteristic of sustainable economy. Going from official statistics on business demography and complementary empirical data, in this research, we focus on enterprise survival trends in Russia and the EU. The results obtained for Russia assume that in a number of industries, there is an intensive turnover of companies. Over the past two years, a medium-term trend towards a reducing number of enterprise births and increasing number of enterprise deaths in Russia has had a negative ratio. The average enterprise survival rate within a horizon of one year (2013/2014) was 74% in Russia and 77% in the EU. For a five-year period of 2009/2014, the average enterprise survival rate was less than 55% and 45% respectively. In general, in countries with a low average enterprise survival rate, in the first year, there is a persisting low rating in almost all of the industries, assuming that trends in enterprise sustainability dynamics depend on an overall economic situation instead of specifics in a particular sector. An important conclusion from the research is that the long-term survival rate of Russian companies is clearly higher, while the short-term one is lower than that of companies in the EU.

The article considers the peculiarities of the mechanism of public-private partnership. An important problem of the research is to find an optimal ratio in the investment distribution when the arising positive externalities are maximized. In the critical literature review, the assumption was made that the balance between the market and state methods of regulation allows reaching the sustainable growth from the point of view of the use of resources. This hypothesis is developed in the analysis of the multiplicative effect through the index of GDP investment capacity. The research approach is based upon the study of the regression dependencies: multidimensional optimization is solved by the method of configurations with performing the iteration procedure. The obtained results show that the state contribution into the total investment potential of the projects of public-private partnership is traditionally low. The maximal investment capacity of the economy can be reached when maintaining the structure of investment distribution at the ratio 0.09/0.91 for the public and private sectors, respectively. The practical use of the optimization model allows to introduce the flexible mechanism of coordination of the terms of project financing.

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