A permutation test on the relationship between Circular Economy and firm size [Test di permutazione sulla relazione tra Economia Circolare e dimensione dell’azienda]

Circular Economy (CE) has recently become the focus of the debate regarding environmental sustainability. An interesting hypothesis concerns the effect of companies’ size on the propensity of SMEs to undertake CE activities. The main difficulty of testing this hypothesis is due to confounding factors such as company age and business sector. We propose a multistrata combined permutation test and we apply it to original data concerning Italian SMEs in the metal sector.