Özet:

SMEs are the cornerstones of any economies and they create and drive the fundamental improvements in the economies and hence the main purpose of this study is to investigate the thoughts of SMEs about Turkey’s EU accession and how to be affected their internationalization activities by a possible membership. To this end, a questionnaire was applied to 146 manufacturing SMEs in Adana, Gaziantep and Istanbul which are the three of the high-volume cities of international trade in Turkey and export 50% of total exports. The data gained from questionnaire analyzed with frequency distribution analysis and ANOVA. As a result, SMEs were found to be undecided about the EU membership and the most important reason of this ambivalence towards membership seems insufficient knowledge about the EU. This result may be very important in terms of achieving a successful accession process because they have one of the most important and key role in the possible accession. Therefore, the relevant institutions, as a first step, should carry out some serious information and training activities to SMEs about exactly what they will be faced with the membership, advantages and disadvantages and how to overcome these possible disadvantages, how to benefit from EU funds and supporting organizations and so on

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