THE PERCEPTION OF LEGAL RISK AND ITS IMPACT ON THE BUSINESS OF SMES

Abstract

One of the prerequisites for a favourable business environment is a stable legislative context and law enforcement. In particular, for SMEs, that do not have the financial resources for stable legal assistance, legal risk is becoming one of the most important business risks. The aim of this paper is to enrich the current scientific knowledge with a comparison of the impact of legal risk on SMEs in selected countries. The empirical research was conducted by Tomas Bata University in Zlín during 2019-2020. In total, 1935 SMEs completed the questionnaire and their responses were examined to fulfil the purpose of the paper. The four statistical hypotheses were analysed through statistical methods such as Z-score and Chi-square tests, with IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 used for data evaluation. Findings highlight that more than 50% of SMEs consider the management of legal risk as appropriate. Only 39% of SMEs consider the business environment as over-regulated. Almost 50% of entrepreneurs agree that their business is affected by frequent legislative changes but with no negative impact. There are statistically significant differences in consideration of legal risk between SMEs from the Czech Republic and the rest of the selected countries (Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine).