Performance and perspective of family businesses within the tourism sector in Slovakia - Статья

Performance and perspective of family businesses within the tourism sector in Slovakia Free economy market is based on the competition principle and on the free establishing of prices. Concerning this, SMEs have an important economic function. They are more flexible and adaptable to the market innovations. Moreover, they still produce and innovate to survive among the strong competition. They also participate significantly in the total employment number. Thereby, they play an important role by the creation of the potential job vacancies, and they contribute directly to the unemployment decrease and competitiveness increase of individual economies. The greatest growth in the world experienced the SMEs in the 1970s, especially with the help of the state interventions and antimonopolist market protection. Thereafter, the important function of the SMEs started to be emphasized within the individual economies. Private businesses are within the EU the drive for the whole economy. Furthermore, significant part of these businesses consists exactly of the family businesses. Family businesses have in Europe a long tradition and they form an important part of economies of individual countries. Majority of such businesses can be classified according to their size as the SME. With the change of the social and economic conditions and economy transformation, the business interest in Slovakia increased. However, the growth of the private businesses started in Slovakia firstly in 1990s, i.e. after the economy transformation period from the socialistic economy to the market economy. At the present time, the relatively most important part of the SMEs consists of family businesses. According to structural changes in economy that were mentioned by American sociologist Daniel Bell (1973) in his Theory about the post-industrial society, such changes led to the consolidation of the importance and meaning of the service sector within individual economies and caused the transfer from the manufacturing to service economy. This claims also the significant share of the service sector, namely in the total employment number of advanced economies. Moreover, in the long term, they achieve shares averaged round 70% within EU, and 80% in the USA In Slovakia, this share covers less than 60% (OECD, 2014). Tourism, as an important service sector part, is one of the most dynamically developing fields not only world-wide but also in Slovakia. The most crucial role within the tourism development has exactly the private sector - small and medium family enterprises in Slovakia, however, are still not able to reach the average of advanced countries. The intention of the submitted article is to identify representatives of specific family business subjects within the frame of the SMEs in Slovakia and their activity in the sector structure of the Slovak economy, especially their presence within the tertiary sector and their activity within the tourism field. According to the Family Firm Institute (FFI), family businesses take a share in the GDP generation within the world countries up to the 70-90%. Following the International Enterprise Research Academy, European family businesses have approximately 85% share in the total number of family businesses. Even further, in the USA is this share round 95% (Odehnalova, Pirozek, 2013). The report regarding the family businesses published by the EY (2014) - Family Business Yearbook - confirms the importance of family businesses in Europe. As a matter of fact, these businesses create 70% of the European GDP and employ more than 144 million people. John Davis claims that family businesses account for 2/3 of all the businesses around the world. By the European Commission report (2009), more than 60% of all the European businesses owned by families generate 40-50% of all the job vacancies. Australian family businesses employ 50% of all the human resources.