Assessing the importance of market risk and its sources in SMEs of the Visegrad group and Serbia

Abstract

The main goal of the paper is to assess the market risk sources of small and medium-sized enterprises in the V4 and Serbia according to the business environment of the countries analyzed. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire-based survey was carried out involving 1,905 small and medium-sized enterprises in these countries. Market risk sources include: losing customers, strong competition in the area of business, stagnation of the market, and unreliability of suppliers. Mathematical statistics tools (PivotTables, Relative Frequency, goodness of fit and Z-Score) were used to compare the evaluation of selected market risk sources. According to the entrepreneurs' evaluation, the partial results of this research show that the most serious source of market risk is losing customers (22%). The country of operation of the entrepreneurs is a statistically significant factor when evaluating all sources of risk. There are statistically significant differences between entrepreneurs in the countries analyzed when evaluating - the high and very high intensity of - the following market risk sources: "losing customers", "stagnation of the market" and "unreliability of suppliers". © 2018 Hindawi Limited. All rights reserved.