Sustainable Growth Rate: Evidence from Agricultural and Food Enterprises

Abstract

Sustainable growth rate is a maximum growth rate that one enterprise may achieve with a given set of financial policies. The growth of an enterprise per rate higher than sustainable growth rate may lead to financial troubles, insolvency, even to the enterprise bankruptcy. In order to be able to finance a rapid growth, the enterprise will have to issue new shares, increase indebtedness, change its dividend policy, increase production efficiency or improve the asset turnover ratio. The enterprise growth per rate lower than sustainable may lead to a stagnation of the enterprise. The main goal of this paper is to show a sustainable growth rate calculation methodology and to apply this methodology in the determination of a sustainable growth rate in 2011 and 2012 for 60 enterprises in Serbia belonging to the agricultural and food sectors. Likewise, this paper is concerned with the comparison of the enterprise sustainable growth rate per stated sectors, the determination of existence of possible differences in their height in 2012 in relation to 2011 and with an overview of inflation effect on sustainable growth rate perselected sectors. All this is done in order to assess sustainable growth of agricultural and food sectors in the years under consideration. Research results indicate that possibilities for the sustainable growth were scarce or there was no real sustainable growth in agricultural and food sectors in 2011 and 2012.