ECO-ZOMBIE is an international and interdisciplinary project which brings together collaboration between accounting, finance, statistic and business teachers, from six different universities. 

The project aims are to identify patterns to business risks and to discriminate zombie firms as problematic firms and bioeconomy firms as beneficial firms, all analysing public financial information. Current society demands strategies to distribute scarce financing funds to boost the economy and overcome the economic collapse. Concretely, this research project has three main propositions:

1) to identify the main business risks in the current context, especially focused on modelling credit risks, new approaches for measuring credit insurance risks, internationalization and social entrepreneurship.

2) to know what a zombie firm is. They are unprofitable as firms that are unable to cover debt costs from profits over an extended period and perverse for the competence as they preserve inefficiencies while stifling productivity, growth, and innovation. If the European Commission, governments and banks want to distribute funds to reactive the post’ COVID-19 era, zombie firms should disappear to avoid the funding concentration to these companies.

3) as to strength a new business model we will identify bioeconomy firms in order to boost them. Bioeconomy firms are beneficial for the economy as they are sustainable. They are also called green businesses. These enterprises have a minimal negative impact or potentially a positive effect on the global and/or local environment, in line with the sustainable development goals (SDG) of the United Nations and the EU Green Deal.