The Structure of Capital and Revenue in Social Enterprises

Social enterprises follow financially sustainable strategies to achieve their social goals and to solve a wide range of social problems. Our main research questions aim at discovering differences in the structure of capital and revenue of social enterprises in different sectors and their having different legal forms.
In this paper we analyse public benefit organisations as examples of Polish social enterprises. We follow the European Research Network (EMES) definition of the social enterprise [Defourny and Nyssens, 2006] and take into consideration only these of public benefits organisations which operate continuously, have volunteers, and explore economic activities. The study is restricted to the few of activity domains: ecology, education and health protection, and to the most popular legal forms: associations and foundations. The sample analysed is composed of 90 enterprises where in total, we have 45 associations and 45 foundations (within the each legal form, 15 organisations represent one of the activity domains).
We analyse the financial statements of Polish social enterprises and capture relations between legal forms, domains of activities and their financial structure. We find that there are significant differences in revenue, equity and debt structures. Furthermore, we find that the capital structure of social enterprises is highly dependent on the environment and conditions under which they are active.

Jaar van publicatie:2014

Trefwoorden:Social enterprises, public benefit organisations, revenue structure, equity and debt, income, capital structure