ECONOMIC POTENTIAL OF ENTERPRISES: ESSENCE, TYPES AND PECULIARITIES OF FORMATION

One of the reasons for the low level of economic efficiency of many enterprises is their lack of a proper mechanism for finding reserves to increase this level. One of the most effective mechanisms is the assessment of the aggregate economic potential of enterprises and its main varieties. Such an assessment makes it possible to identify all the main opportunities unused by enterprises to increase the value of the financial and economic results of their operation. At the same time, as business practice shows, managers and specialists often do not pay the necessary attention to the issue of assessing the economic potential of enterprises. On the other hand, in modern research, the problem of such assessment has not yet been finally resolved. To a large extent, this is due to the fact that the theoretical foundations of the process of determining the economic potential of enterprises are currently not fully formed and, therefore, require further development and improvement. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to improve the theoretical basis for assessing the economic potential of enterprises on the basis of clarifying its essence, developing a typology, and clarifying the peculiarities of the formation of this potential. Among other things, it is proposed to identify the economic potential of the enterprise with the totality of its resources and competencies of employees (both existing and those that can be acquired additionally), which, under a certain state of the external environment, enable it to achieve the best quantitative level of the chosen goal (goals) of activity. A number of new signs of grouping types of economic potential of enterprises are highlighted, in particular: according to the level of generalization of the goals of realizing the enterprise's potential, according to the availability of the enterprise at the moment of time of the necessary volumes of resources and competences to achieve the set goals, according to the time of achievement of the corresponding goals of the enterprise's activity, etc. A three-level model of the formation of the current economic potential of enterprises has been developed. According to it, the factors that determine this potential are divided into three groups: primary factors; secondary factors, the quantitative assessment of which is based on information about primary factors; generalizing factors. At the same time, the quantitative assessment of the factors of the third group is based on the use of information about primary and secondary factors that have an impact on the current economic potential of the enterprise, and the application of appropriate methods of processing such information (in particular, optimization methods).