Authors: Dimitrios Koumanakos, Kristjana Jace, Evangelos Koumanakos

Title: Are social enterprises social indeed?

Abstract

Social enterprises (SEs) have been emerged in EU over the last years as a hybrid and promising at the same time vehicle in the governments’ battle against growing unemployment, poverty and unmet societal challenges. Academic papers so far have mainly focused on the investigation of the theoretical foundations of SEs through qualitative research methods while empirical research investigating quantitatively various financial aspects of SEs is almost non-existent.

Our purpose in this paper is to examine the tax compliance behavior of SEs in seven European countries where there is an established legal framework for distinguishing this type of firms from other national legal forms of commercial companies. Contrary to what one might expect our results are indicative of a rather tax aggressive behavior adopted by SEs probably as a way to overcome their financial constrain. Given the international nature of this study we argue that the inferences might be of great importance for policy makers in developing the future agenda for SEs expansion and sustainability across Europe.