Welcome back.
So now, we're talking about Milestone Two of your project and in Milestone Two,
we're going to have you pick your country.
Now that's a process and we want you to come up with as an objective of a process,
as you possibly can.
After all, you're presenting this to your board of directors.
They need to realize that you're being thorough and
are giving a lot of thought to country that you end up selecting.
So, what we want you to do is come up with an index to rank all countries
by their relative attractiveness for your industry and your product.
So, this initial ranking should include all or most of the countries out there.
There's a lot of different sources of information that you might use to begin
this now.
There's IMF, the World Bank, The UN, The Economist,
TradingEconomics.com is another good source of information.
So, feel free to use any or all of those sources of information.
The variables that you end up using as a part of the analysis is totally up to you.
It should be a number of variables.
We won't tell you how many, as that depends on what you think.
This is about as much about you exercising your judgment and demonstrating,
you got good judgment to the board of directors as anything else.
So the variables might be economic,
particularly associated with your product though, we don't expect you
to go after proprietary data these going to cost money.
So if we were doing this in the real world, we would probably be willing to
spend that kind of money and go after some very specific data that would help us rank
countries that way, but that's not our situation.
We're doing this as an exercise.
So in this case, you're going to have to come up with what are called proxies or
approximations for what you want.
And this can be pretty high-level data like if your product
is a consumer oriented product,
then use consumption expenditure at the aggregate level by country.
For instance, it might be a good way to get that variable take care of.
So you can have economical variables,
you can have political variables and business-related variables.
Those are things that are going to be completely up to you to make a decision.
You'll have to rank,
then you'll have to combine these variables into some kind of ranking.
So, you want to be careful with the way that you combine the variables make sense
and can be well defended in front of your board of directors.
At the end of the process as you'll see here, I got a sample,
country ranking example table that I've just come with.
This, in this case, we have five variables.
We don't list those variables.
Of course, that would be up to you to decide and then we would weight each of
those five variables in some way that we deemed to be appropriate.
And at the end of the day, we'd have that column that is the ranking by
country going from one all the way down to the bottom to your last country.
You're going to need to,
it's going to be important that this ranking system be transparent and clear,
because it can be kind of complicated, so you want to make it simple.
You don't want to show how complex it is, you want to show how straight forward and
sensible it is to your board of directors.
You'll want to explain that waiting system briefly,
so that people can understand the rationale that you used.
And then you want to be able to demonstrate that the countries
at the top of that ranking, in particular the number one country,
which is ultimately what you are trying to identify makes sense for
your business to be the first country to expand into.
Joseph A. PetryClinical Professor of Economics and Finance
