What determines propensity to get public investment subsidies? A case study of the Czech food industry

The aim of the paper is to is to quantify differences in structural and economic indicators between participants and nonparticipants of the investment support programmes in the Czech food industry at the beginning of the old programming period (2007). Resear ch was conducted on a dataset of supported projects from the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Industry and Trade combined with structural and economic indicators of participating and nonparticipating companies provided by MagnusWeb database. Final database contained 1 225 companies. However, not all indicators were available for all companies. Original set of variables w as selected through Principal Component Analysis. Propensity to be supported was calculated through probit regression. Public investment support has had pretensions to increase productivity of the food industry as well as the added value of agricultural production by supporting many operations in agricultural processing and marketing. Ex-post evaluation of the “old” programming period 2007–14 shows that companies with larger size, lower trade margin, optimal liquidity, lower debt ratio and higher credit debt ratio had higher propensity to be supported. Conclusions about size and credit debt ratio follow previous resea rch by other authors that small companies had lower chance to be supported because of more difficult access to good advisory services and bank loans