Economic Crisis in EU: Impact on Greek and Irish Enterprises According its Size and Sector

European corporate have been strongly influenced by the recent economic crisis. Financial statements of businesses provide clear evidence of economic downturn's impact on corporate finance. The objective of this article is to explore similarities/dissimilarities among development of Greek and Irish corporates’ finance in different industries using cluster analysis and subjective mapping based on microeconomic data from Amadeus database. Authors selected Greek and Ireland, because they represent countries from EU periphery, which has been strongly negatively influenced by economic crisis. However author believes that the structural differences will lead over the time in faster recovery of Irish businesses in contrast to the Greek one.The database Amadeus of Bureau van Dijk was used as the primal source of harmonized corporate financial statements. The dataset consists of more than 3,500 businesses, which were identified as those with either 3 year continuous increase or decrease of their total employed capital's profitability. Such a development authors consider as a sorting criterion of financially well/badly performing companies. For the purpose of analysis authors analyse the data series three years of crisis (2008, 2009 and 2010). There is another important supplementary criterion's; these are NACE revision 2 categorization of economic activities and economic size of company, measured by its turnover, amount of assets and number of employees. In the study we use the cluster analysis to detect some basic patterns and trends in business sector in terms of homogeneity within dataset. The single correspondence analysis method was employed for the purpose of the subjective mapping. Based on the results of conducted analysis authors provide explanatory outlook over similarities/dissimilarities among sectors.