Progressive changes in many areas of the business environment and internal processes in business entities are increasingly the cause of crises occurring in them, in extreme cases resulting in the need to declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcies can be considered, on the one hand, as a manifestation of maladaptation to the requirements and transformations of the market, but more and more often they become a derivative of phenomena over which entrepreneurs have absolutely no influence. The paper attempts to analyze the scale of business bankruptcies in Poland in 2009-2021, which was based on data from the Central Statistical Office and the Central Economic Information Center. Exploratory research was carried out on a time sample of 12,960 entities for the years 2009-2021, which declared bankruptcy in the analyzed period and represented all enterprises of the Polish market from the time period adopted for the research. The analyzed sample took into account the number of bankruptcies of enterprises falling on particular years. The purpose of the article is to analyze the scale of the bankruptcy phenomenon in Poland over the period 2009-2021 and to try to identify the existing dependencies.
The dynamics of changes in the business environment, globalization of economies with the rapid progress in technology make entrepreneurs accept the growing level of risk of crisis situations. The economic transformations that have been taking place over the years have initiated the emergence of mechanisms for crowding out unprofitable enterprises from the market that do not match the requirements of the market economy. On the one hand, bankruptcies may be regarded as a manifestation of failure to adapt to market requirements and changes, but more and more often they become a derivative of phenomena beyond the control of entrepreneurs. In particular, we are talking about ever new types of risk that accompanies business activity. The fact that the catalog of occurring risks is still an open catalog is evidenced by, for example, the recent events related to the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper attempts to present the scale of the businesses bankruptcy in Poland in 2009-2018 and a cross-sectional analysis taking into account the geographical origin of the bankrupt entities, the legal forms where they operated and the industries they represented. The analysis of the phenomenon was based on the data of the Central Statistical Office and own research of the documentation of the National Court Register. The purpose of the paper was to analyze the scale of the bankruptcy phenomenon in Poland over the years 2009-2018 and an attempt to identify the existing relationships.