Prospects for supersymmetry discoveries at future e+e- colliders

At LEP-200 and at a future 500 GeV e+ e- linear collider, signals of supersymmetric particle production can be distinguished from the competing standard background processes both for scalar leptons and for charginos, and the discovery reach is close to the beam energy. The neutral Higgs sector of the MSSM can be decisively probed at a centre-of-mass energy of 500 GeV: at least one Higgs boson must be discovered, or the model is ruled out; the simultaneous observation of the three neutral Higgs bosons predicted by the model can be achieved in a large fraction of the parameter space