Abstract
The article studies high-tech SME sector in the European Union with the aim to trace its dynamics over the period of macroeconomic instability (from 2008 to 2023) and to rank EU Member States by theeconomic progress of their high-tech SME sector. Scholars have written much about SMEs and their role in national economies. What they have largely disregarded so far is the SMEs’ contribution to the high-tech industries. In this paper with the help of qualitative methods we shed light on the relationship between the high-tech SME sector size and the dynamics of its key variables: number of enterprises and employees, added value and productivity. We have developed a composite index of SMEs’ contribution to the economic development of high-tech industries and calculated it both for the whole EU and for its Member States. The proposed index has at least two useful qualities: it is easily calculated and it allows to employ public statistics data. This article finds that the sector of European SMEs in industries with above-average technological intensity surpasses by its scale and growth rates the similar sector in industries with high technological intensity. However, the latter demonstrates higher resilience in the times of economic instability.