Financial sustainability of private higher education institutions: the case of publicly traded educational institutions

The article is dedicated to the solution of the relevant issue, concerning management of enterprise`s financial sustainability. Financial sustainability assessment is one of the most important principles of enterprise`s activity, which provides information about financial capabilities of the company at the time of its evaluation and for the future. It is a requirement for the enterprise activity, which provides a high level of competitiveness, efficiency and intensity. Thus, the restoration and strengthening of financial sustainability is a priority task for the enterprise, a basic precondition for its effective functioning. The purpose of the research is to analyze financial sustainability and to improve the methods and approaches of its evaluation. The following methods were used in this research: financial and economic analysis, economic and mathematical modeling, analysis and synthesis, comparison. The main results of the study are following: the theoretical and essential characteristics of enterprise financial sustainability has been determined; the financial status of PJSC “Turboatom” has been analyzed; the taxonomic index of financial sustainability has been calculated and the forecast of its significance has been made, the approaches to increase enterprise financial sustainability have been proposed.

Until recently, the statistical approach was the main technique in solving the prediction problem. In the framework of static models, the tasks of forecasting, the identification of hidden periodicity in data, analysis of dependencies, risk assessment in decision making, and others are solved. The general disadvantage of statistical models is the complexity of choosing the type of the model and selecting its parameters. Computing intelligence methods, among which artificial neural networks should be considered at first, can serve as alternative to statistical methods. The ability of the neural network to comprehensively process information follows from their ability to generalize and isolate hidden dependencies between input and output data. Significant advantage of neural networks is that they are capable of learning and generalizing the accumulated knowledge. The article proposes a method of neural networks training in solving the problem of prediction of the time series. Most of the predictive tasks of the time series are characterized by high levels of nonlinearity and non-stationary, noisiness, irregular trends, jumps, abnormal emissions. In these conditions, rigid statistical assumptions about the properties of the time series often limit the possibilities of classical forecasting methods. The alternative methods to statistical methods can be the methods of computational intelligence, which include artificial neural networks. The simulation results confirmed that the proposed method of training the neural network can significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the time series.

The eradication of poverty is an important priority for the South African government. The Constitution makes provision for vulnerable households and, therefore, local government has to develop policies to address the needs of the poor. Municipalities developed and adopted Indigent Policies to ensure that the poor households have access to essential basic services. This led the researcher to investigate what challenges are related to the financial sustainability of the Indigent Policy in its implementation process at the City of Cape Town for the period from 2003 to 2016. This study followed a qualitative research approach. Data were collected by conducting in-depth interviews. The participants were selected, because they had access to the most recent information that relates to the Indigent Policy. The researcher respected the rights of participants by allowing them the freedom to withdraw at any stage of the research study, ensuring confidentiality, ensuring anonymity, ensuring fair treatment and protecting the participants from any harm and discomfort throughout the research study. The researcher is of the opinion that all of the respondents are confident that the Indigent Policy is sustainable. However, should it become too expensive for the City of Cape Town to maintain the Indigent Policy, it could result in the budget of some other services being reprioritized. It is recommended that the City of Cape Town develops a beneficiary system for qualified indigents to allow them to receive additional benefits from other City of Cape Town facilities such as libraries, swimming pools and the MyCiTi bus services.