What are country rankings and indices?
Indices and rankings that allow the comparison of all (or many) countries of the world according to the respective composite measures. The indices cover many data points, including demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, military and environmental dimensions of global change.
Sources for rankings and indices
Frequently used indices and rankings
What can you learn from a country report?
Country reports provide a holistic view of the country, with insightful analysis about current and future conditions and issues, supplemented with relevant quantitative data to support trend analysis. Typically these reports can include information about the country’s political, economic, social/demographic, technological, legal, and environmental indicators and performance.
Often referred to as PESTLE analysis, you might expect to understand: the political system through analysis of key figures in the country and governance indicators; the economic situation through a balanced assessment of core macroeconomic issues; customer demographics through analysis of income distribution and the rural-urban split, as well as healthcare and education; the technological landscape through analysis of relevant laws and policies; the legal landscape through analysis of the judicial system as well as performance of the legal indicators; and the environmental landscape through analysis of the environmental regulations and the performance of environmental indicators.
Additional Sources of Country Reports
Consulting Firm White Papers – Reflect deep global industry knowledge; well researched with cites to all data included; well written; free on the internet. Ddeloitte, PWC, EY, Kpmg, Bain, BCG, Mckinsey, aAcenture), run the following type of search in Google; only search for one firm at a time, changing the inurl:commend for each additional firm.
When collecting country data is it very important to: understand methodology behind data collection; be able to compare “apples to apples” when comparing multiple countries; have confidence that the data is credible. Use the sources below to locate and create custom spreadsheets for one or cross-country data analysis.
For more recommendations, see the Statistics & Data page of this guide.
U.S. Only
International Data
Government Agencies – Most of the U.S. government agencies collect economic and industrial data; for example, USDA, Foreign Agriculture Service and UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The benefit of using U.S. generated data is that it is reported in USD currency. If you do go directly to a country’s government for data, be careful to convert the currency and to look for explanations of the methodology for collecting the data do that you can confidently compare data across data sets.
The following databases contain academic articles, studies, and news about the global business and economic climate.