Internationalization: Which foreign country to go to – A Country Comparison Calculator
Many times the internationalization of a company to a certain country has its origin in some random occurrence and not in a systematic approach. As a result later on with the passing of time problems occur that put the enterprise in serious difficulties and give rise to regrets.
The purpose of this article is to show that the choice of a foreign country with which a company will start its internationalization can be constructively made by following a methodical approach based, in some way, on quantitative criteria and should not be left to chance events.
In addressing the issue, we developed a “Country Comparison Calculator” presented here. This calculator entails the selection of appropriate criteria which it then quantifies and categorizes into two groups: (a) Opportunities & Strengths and (b) Risks & Weaknesses. We viewed Economics from the angle of Opportunities and Strengths while from the angle of Risks and Weaknesses we viewed the rest categorizing them in line with the PESTELE, the extra E is for Ethics, into Politics, Society, Technology, Environment, Law and Ethics.
The selected criteria are shown in the tabular form that follows. We especially note that some criteria are company purpose-specific (Foreign market sector specific entry in the table).
Each of the criteria is made up of a number of sub-criteria. For these sub-criteria, there exist data from published sources. The data collected are then used to fill in the cells for each sub-criterion in the comparison table for each country (not shown here). When all the data for all sub-criteria are completed, the interested party, on the basis of the quantitative picture of the relevant part of the table, evaluates quantitatively each criterion, say on a scale 1 to 10, as in [...]
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