ANALYSIS OF WORKING CAPITAL EFFICIENCY FOR ARABLE CROP FARMS IN HUNGARY
Szabolcs MAKAI1, Vilmos LAKATOS2
1 University of Debrecen, Faculty of Economics, Ihrig Károly Doctoral School, Hungary
2 University of Debrecen, Faculty of Economics, Institute of Accounting and Finance, Hungary
makaiszabolcs@talentis.com
lakatos.vilmos@econ.unideb.hu
Abstract: Our study is a thematic analysis of the literature on working capital, aiming to present the latest research and interpretations on working capital management. In the second part of the paper, we present an assessment of capital adequacy and working capital efficiency and their results, based on our own data collection and compared with the findings of the literature. There is a substantial international literature on the impact of working capital, which examines the returns and the impact on profitability of the stock of inventories, the turnover of various current assets and the cycle days associated with working capital management. In our study, we used these aspects to select asset endowment and turnover-income profitability indicators from the EMIS database for Hungarian arable crop farms, searching for correlations by regression analysis for three years 2018, 2020 and 2022. Our results show that working capital endowment specifically showed significant correlations with operating revenue in all three years, while the other explanatory variables mostly gave significant correlations only for the year 2022. The size of the Hungarian agricultural economy is specifically characterised by micro and small enterprises, therefore we categorised the enterprises into micro, small, medium and large enterprises based on the value of their assets and their revenue. The number of enterprises specifically engaged in cereal and oilseed production by size category thus differed significantly, and multivariate regression was no longer possible for the two larger categories. In these cases, correlation analysis preceded regression analysis. Examining working capital efficiency by firm size, small farms showed significant correlations with profitability, but they also tended to do so only for the year 2022.
Keywords: asset value; working capital; profitability; regression analysis; different sizes of firms
