Sustainable Growth in SMEs: A Review from the Malaysian Perspective

The importance of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) contributions to the nations’ economies in the world is an undebatable fact. The same applies to Malaysia with 98.5% of the total business establishments being SMEs; contributing to 65.3% of total employment and 36.3% of GDP. Supports from the Government are never fading with huge allocations of budget every year but yet registering high failure rate. Sustainable growth of SMEs is long overdue. The awareness of the importance of sustainable growth of SMEs has resulted in the presence of various definitions and concepts of sustainable growth. This paper seeks to explore the literature on long-term and sustainable growth for SMEs and the enhanced knowledge on this area willbe aguidance to the policy makers, supporting agencies, advisors, entrepreneurs and academicians to seriously develop an all-encompassing model for sustainable growth of SMEs. This paper suggests an integrated sustainable growth model of SMEs with four dimensions of the economic factors.