Home

European Union member countries experienced a decrease in the macroeconomic performance during the early stages of the economic and debt crisis. Significant deterioration in the fiscal stance as one of the primary implications of the economic recession revealed questions associated with fiscal sustainability in terms of threshold levels of fiscal deficit and sovereign debt that individual countries can sustain over longer period of time (Wöhlbier, Astarita, & Mourre, 2014).

Knowledge is considered as a critical strategic resource for organizations in the contemporary knowledge-intensive economy. According to the resource based view of firms, one among other sources of firm’s competitive advantage is knowledge. Research shows that knowledge sharing is a key enabler of knowledge management (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Alavi & Leidner, 2001). Many organizations assert knowledge sharing vital to exploit core competencies and to achieve sustained competitive advantage.

In general, an economic growth is defined as an increase in the capacity of an economy to produce goods and services, compared from one period of time to another. In macroeconomics, the economic growth is expressed by changes in real GDP. The existence of business cycles was observed and studied since 19th century.

In today’s competitive environment, creating and maintaining customer satisfaction and consequently customer loyalty is of vital importance to the companies. At the same time, it is a challenging task because little is known about how customers differ in their relational preferences (Palmatier et al., 2006) and because there are a lot of variables that influence customer loyalty. Although customers tend to be more demanding and less loyal (Reichheld, 1996), service marketers are convinced that building enduring relationships with the customers is incredibly important because loyal customers are less costly to serve, buy more, pay premium prices and spread positive word-of-mouth (Zeithaml, 2000; O’Brian & Jones, 1995).

According to Wu (2010), the internal causes of firm bankruptcy may be seen in insufficient management skills, marketing and an inability to compete. They are refl ected in company performance. For this reason, accounting data, or rather financial ratios, are a frequent source of information for assessing the stability and viability of an enterprise.