Micro, Small or Medium, New or Old—Are There Differences? Testing Business-Specific Difficulties

The use of various mathematical and statistical methods for modelling economic processes and phenomena requires compliance with certain conditions/rules. To formulate general conclusions or predictions, in economic research, large databases are often used, related to more or less homogeneous samples, without taking into account the spatial or structural differences of the analysed processes or phenomena. Starting from the results of previous research focused on the identification and evaluation of difficulties in the business environment, the present study is based on the principles of mathematical induction, with the objective of testing these results, in order to assess whether the conclusions formulated are valid for a limited number of cases. Based on the primary data collected and tested (using Cronbach alpha, Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett tests) it was shown that the difficulties selected for evaluation are present in the analysed business environment. Then, factor analysis was applied to identify the most important groups of factors, which bring together one or more difficulties specific to the analysed population. After the validation of the factorial model and after a preliminary test of the normality of the variables, the Mann-Whitney U test was applied to assess whether, at the level of independent groups (constructed on the basis of three dichotomous variables), the difficulties identified are common or show significant differences. Contrary to the results of previous studies, the present study indicates that the difficulties analysed affect more new businesses (recently established), which have fewer employees and are classified as micro-enterprises.