Competitiveness of Small and Medium - sized Enterprises in the Single European Market

Small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe and Slovakia are an important factor in economic growth and development, helping to address the urgent social, economic and political challenges of countries and regions, and thus become an important determinant of the healthy economic development of the European Commuity. The aim of the paper is to define the nature and importance of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Slovak economy and to point out the marketing assumptions of their competitiveness in the EU common market. In the paper, we identify the barriers, strengths and weaknesses of Slovak SMEs in their low expansion to the competitive single EU market, which resulted from a quantitative field survey, which was carried out on a sample of 256 randomly selected SMEs in the SR.