INEbase / Suspensions of Payment and Declarations of Bankruptcies / General methodology

The objective of the statistic is to know the number of companies, or creditors of these companies, that have filed a suspension of payments or bankruptcy declaration with the Court because of financial crisis, and had their petition accepted.

Research scope

Population scope

The population scope studied is formed by the Court of First Instance and Preliminary Investigations and the Court of First Instance, which are the legal bodies where suspension of payment or bankruptcy declarations are presented.

Geographical scope

Deals with the whole country.

Temporal scope

The reference period is monthly, until December 2001. As of 2002, the reference period is quarterly.

Variables and definitions

Suspension of Payments

The request for a suspension of payments can be presented by the business person or trading company that, possessing sufficient capital to cover debts, foresees the impossibility of meeting these obligations on the respective due dates because of a lack in liquidity, shortage of demand for production or services, low productivity or other causes.

Bankruptcy declaration

A company is considered in a state of bankruptcy when it can no longer meet its obligations with current payments. The actual presentation of the request to open a petition can be carried out by the very business person or their creditors. Legally, there are five types of bankruptcy: suspension of payments, fortuitous insolvency, gratuitous insolvency, fraudulent insolvency and fraudulent conveyance.

Collection method

Information is collected by mail. Each Court sends a completed questionnaire for each petition presented, be they suspension of payments or bankruptcy declaration. A negative report is issued for months when no petitions are presented.

Tabulation

Once the questionnaires are recorded, they are submitted to filtering programs and methods to correct the possible errors. The information is tabulated when all phases are finished.

The INE elaborates informative sheets monthly with the most significant provisional data, and annual sheets with the definitive data. In addition to this annual sheet, the quarterly and annual summaries on an Autonomous Community scale are published in Annual tables.

Dissemination of the information

The results obtained from the Trading companies statistic are diversified into different tables published at different levels, according to the following editions:

Quarterly statistical bulletin
Summary of annual results
Statistical yearbook
Electronic publication
On Internet
Press release
Summary of quarterly results