Prejdú slovenskí malí a strední podnikatelia testom kvality?
Will Slovakia’s SMEs Pass the Quality Test?

Summary/Abstract: Will Slovakia’s SMEs Pass the Quality Test? This paper assesses trends and policies in Slovakia up to 1999 in the context of evidence about the development of, and the problems faced by, SMEs throughout East-Central Europe. The new evidence about the wider East-Central European situation is from interviews in 1997 with 400 young (aged up to 30) self-employed people, and parallel studies of the support being offered to the self-employed by state services and non-governmental organisations (NGOS), in four East-Central European countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). The samples were representative of the New East’s better-established young business people. Nevertheless, nearly all their enterprises were very basic. Such small businesses were the main source of employment growth in East-Central Europe in the 1990s, but they have simultaneously become part of the region’s main labour market problems. Unemployment remains stubbornly high largely because many of those concerned are reluctant to accept and settle in the low quality jobs that small businesses offer. The evidence presented in this paper explains why, in turn-of-the-century conditions, the New East’s new businesses are in danger of becoming locked into low-productivity, low wage niches. It is argued that the prospects of the new market economies in the twenty-first century depend partly on their ability to promote the development of their more capable SMEs into quality businesses. The measures required to achieve this are identified, and are used as benchmarks for assessing Slovakia’s progress. Sociológia 1999, Vol. 31 (No. 3: 291-306)

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