Portuguese zombie firms 2004-2017

The raw data were drawn from the Portuguese Integrated Business Accounts System (SCIE), a longitudinal dataset containing the structure, activity, inputs and other elements related to the economic/financial nature and competitiveness of firms administered by the Portuguese Statistical Office (INE). The dataset includes all active corporations operating in Portugal in the manufacturing and services industries, excluding utilities, financial sector and social services (i.e. education, health care, cultural and personal services), for the period 2004–2017, and comprises an unbalanced panel of 269,584 firms, making up 2,014,233 firm-year observations over the selected interval. Each firm in the SCIE has a fixed identification number, which enables to follow every single unit longitudinally. Since this is firm real data, all data elements pertaining firms’ identification were deleted. Due to the scarcity of free real business data for scientific and educational purposes, these datasets can have an important role for research and education in industrial organization.