Author's Name:	Pawel Dec, PhD
Subject Area:	Social Science and Humanities
Subject	Finance
Section	Research Paper

Bankruptcy, statistics bankruptcy of enterprises, business survival indexes.

The article includes case studies of research on bankrupt companies in selected countries in the last dozen years. The main part of the study refers to the recent economic crisis, in order to emphasize its negative effect on the economy, by a substantial increase in corporate bankruptcies. At the same time, only those data that were already available and, therefore, concerned mainly the first half. Consideration was most published data containing statistics quoted bankruptcy cases in different countries in the aforementioned period. In this way it was possible to illustrate the scale of this phenomenon and has shown the current trend in Poland and abroad. During the study encountered, a number of difficulties relating to the collection of data and evaluation of their reliability.