У статті проаналізовано історичні та сучасні підходи до визначення поняття "економічний ризик". Основну увагу приділено визначенню суттєвих ознак вказаного поняття, які використовуються у реальній економічній практиці й управлінській діяльності. За результатами проведеного дослідження запропоновано власне узагальнююче трактування поняття "економічний ризик".
The authors review and analyze existing historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the definition of economic risks, reveal essential features and nature of the given concept. It was established that at early development stages of riskology as a science the economic risk was associated only with one component - ambiguity, uncertainty, probability, threat, loss and failure. With the accumulation of new knowledge there appeared definitions of economic risk containing several components. The majority of modern interpretations of the category "economic risk" include qualitative and quantitative concepts as well as a subjective component. According to the results of the content analysis of a large number of literary sources, it has been established that the most important features of the concept "economic risk", if we take into account definitions given by contemporary foreign and dome&stic researchers, are "probability", "loss" and "uncertainty". It is suggested to consider economic risk as an objective-subjective category in the activity of business entities caused by uncertainty related to the random nature of economic processes&, insufficiency and inaccuracy of the information thereof, influence of external and internal environmental factors and calculated on the basis of estimate of the probability of negative (loss) or positive deviation from the expected values in cases &of the subjective choice of the optimal decision among a certain number of alternatives.
