The impact of performance and practice factors on UK manufacturing companies' survival

This paper investigates the effects of manufacturing performance variables and practice factors at the firm level on UK manufacturing companies' survival performance in the last two decades. Statistic tests and econometric modelling have been employed on a longitudinal UK manufacturing database. The statistic tests generate different survival factors for individual sectors and the whole database. Model results support contentions that, in general, technology usage, total factor productivity, quality and cost reduction were important survival factors and, in addition, so were workforce flexibility, innovation and product development process in specific contexts. Furthermore, the results suggest that the probit and logit models can be reasonably robust predicting tools for analysing UK manufacturing companies' survival.