To begin, a business can utilize regional competitiveness reports to learn about an economic region and make a shortlist of countries that merit the attention of their business.
For example, business management may seek to extract information from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report for macro-economic and micro-economic indicators, the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business for business regulations, and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index to understand the nexus between the public and private sector.
However, this information is not a complete picture of all business conditions.
Simply, minimum wage data published by the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report can make for intuitive modeling, but is usually far from the mark when it comes to projecting actual wage costs in many emerging markets. In fact, most regional competitiveness reports use approximate data. Therefore, publicly available information in regional competitiveness reports are best used to develop a shortlist of countries that require further examination.
Information Needs to Scale
Business leaders who need to scale regional competitiveness information to foster support within their organization have several low cost options:
1. Conduct deeper examination that entails country-by-country desktop research as provided by the trade & economic arm of an investor’s embassy/consulate or chamber of commerce. Business leaders can further build on this research with meetings with economic or commercial service officers at the same agencies, which can help bring experiential insights into the decision-making process.
2. Business leaders can also attempt to collate this research with news media and content published by private consultancies. This information often mirrors data provided by multilateral organizations, state governments, and commercial services, albeit with some analysis to factor impact on businesses or more often, an industry or an economy in general.
3. Business leaders may also seek to contact industry associations and its members in target markets. This method is more successful in developed economies, where representatives can afford to facilitate further investment. However, the downside to this approach is that associations in developing economies may struggle to provide veritable information, while representatives may be disinclined to share information freely with outside investors without viable incentives to partner.
Conclusion
In the end, each of these options require time, resources, and expertise. Beyond this, the information gathering process can detract from a business leader’s core responsibility – developing an actionable market entry strategy.