Selected aspects of risk management in Polish and Slovak SMEs

The principles of risk management come to the forefront of managers of both large and small enterprises. The trend in risk management consists of a comprehensive approach to risk management that penetrates within all key processes in the enterprise. Although the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) become to the important pillars of each economy, the risk management in these entities is elaborated only partially. This is affected mainly by attitudes of SMEs’ owners or managers to risks, the lack of knowledge and practical experience in applying risk management. This paper contributes to the wide spreading of knowledge in the area of risk management in SMEs. The main aim of the paper is to compare the selected aspects of risk management between Polish and Slovak SMEs. The compared aspects are: authority to risk management in SMEs, ways of risk identification and risk assessment as well as risk limiting. The research is based on the results of questionnaire survey realized among 150 of Polish and 123 of Slovak SMEs. For the evaluation, the Chi-square test was used.