Indebtedness of Polish enterprises compared to selected countries

This elaboration aims to analyse and compare the debt of Polish enterprises compared to selected European countries which underwent (like Poland) a system transformation in 90s of the last century. The paper makes use of statistical comparable measures of basic indicators of corporate debt during the transformation up to 2012 and the analysis is based on official statistical data of the Central Statistical Office in Poland and EUROSTAT as well as bases published by OECD. Despite the fact that the system transformation proceeded in a similar way, Czech, Hungary and Poland struggled with much the same problems at the beginning of their „democratic” way, however basic behaviour in the economic sphere began to diverge. The differences translated, first of all, into an image of particular countries in view of potential investors. The way entrepreneurs behaved is not without significance as their activities in particular markets including the risk of doing business which involved applying financial leverage. The recent crisis revealed that Polish enterprise do much better than businesses in Czech or Hungary. One of the reasons might be the level of debt and the risk of conducting a business. It is worthwhile examining differences among the particular countries.