The Premature Mortality of Micro and Small Enterprises

Abstract The economy of Ecuador is characterized by a high predominance of micro and small enterprises. Multiple of these organizations are created each year and, as a general rule, the highest percentage die in their first year. Which is a strong reason for the abundance of research aimed at understanding the nature of their behavior. These studies assume different streams of analysis, which are developed from dissimilar areas of knowledge. This particular research seeks to evaluate how multiple variables affect the high annual mortality rate shown by micro and small enterprises. For this purpose, the descriptive statistics of the behavior of the variables are initially used to later identify, through a discriminant analysis, the variables that best explain a possible closure, which are: the attitude of entrepreneurs to face risks and failures, their perseverance, as well as the effectiveness of the feasibility studies that support the birth of the ventures.