Country: GREECE
Your assignment here is to assess the business environment in the country, GREECE, taking care to note any changes that have recently occurred or seem likely occur in the near future. You are to end your paper by rating business prospects in the country as promising, uncertain, or poor.
You may adopt one of two approaches:
A. Assume that you are making a general assessment of the kind that might be made for a mutual fund looking for investment prospects overseas, and your conclusion could include recommendations about which economic sectors or industries offer the best prospects.
B. Assume that you are working for a company that produces a certain kind of product (one of your own choice), so that your final rating is about prospects for that product. Important: if you take this approach, most of your discussion should still be of the country’s general business environment, and it should be mainly in your introduction and conclusion that you refer specifically to your product.
For each of the following (Outline, Written Report and Summary), before you start work on them, review the grading criteria.
OUTLINE
In preparation for writing your complete report, read the requirements below for the full written report and and take account of them to develop a bulleted outline indicating what points the full report will cover and what sources you intend to use. Its length should be one to two pages, not including references.
The object is to show what information specific to your country you intend to cover so you can obtain feedback from your instructor that will be useful in writing your analysis. Provide enough detail so the feedback can be helpful, but don’t exceed the two-page limit for the text. You should show:
1. The key points of information that you intend to cover. They should show that you have already done some useful research. Outlines made up of general points that could apply to any country do not score well.
2. Sources you have consulted or will consult. These are worth a lot of points, even in this outline. See item 4. below on the Written Report to see how to cite your sources.
The intentions and the sources that you show in this Outline are not set in concrete and you may improve on them as you think appropriate when you write your full written report. When you come to write your full report, make sure you take account of the comments your instructor makes on your Outline.
Grading Criteria for Country Analysis
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Outline
Evidence of specific, relevant, useful, accurate and up-to-date information
Well chosen and reliable sources, including up-to-date news articles
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WRITTEN REPORT
Your report must include the following sections with headings and subheadings as appropriate:
Executive summary. — A good summary will either begin or end with a statement of your report’s concluding recommendation, while the rest of it summarizes the key points of your analysis that support that conclusion. (See http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl402/execsum.htm for guidance on how to write a summary.) Pay attention to it because a poor summary will bring down your grade. It should be about one-page long. Place this summary at the beginning of your report, but don’t start to write it until after you have finished the rest of your writing, and do not include the summary in your page count.)
The full paper has three main sections totaling 8 to 10 pages in length, double spaced. Exclude from the page count your title page and table of contents, executive summary, large tables, maps charts, references and appendices.
1. Introduction:Provide a quick and interesting introduction of the paper that also states the purpose of your research in a page or less. Anything that you believe would attract your boss’s attention to exploring this country further could be included. In describing your purpose, make clear whether you have in mind general investment prospects (alternative A above) or a particular product (alternative B). In the latter case remember that this is an analysis of general business prospects, not a marketing plan.
2. Country analysis: In this main body of (6 or 8 pages of the total of 8 to 10), assess your country in terms of circumstances affecting businesses, consumers, and market conditions. (Comments on culture are not to be included in this paper because you have already dealt with that in the brief you wrote earlier.)
Note that in this assignment you must be up-to-date! Students most often lose points by relying too heavily on information from the World Fact Book and similar sites and focusing on descriptions of political and legal structures. These are starting points only and you should be emphasizing recent developments and events, and statistics. You cannot score well without finding and making use of up-to-date news sources. (One way to start out is simply to type “news on country X” into a good search engine.) If there is rioting in the streets or a military coup occurs two days before you submit your paper, you must include it.
Every paper should have the following sections and subsections (Political, Legal and Ethical Environment, Economic Environment, Market Opportunities and Threats, Concluding Recommendations, and References), but what precise points you should cover within each will vary from country to country, so the following are examples rather than points in a rigid check list. The basic principle is to discuss all those points that a real business should take into account when doing business in your chosen country.
• The current political, legal and ethical environment. The head of government and party in power. How long they have been in power and how popular they are. Recent or up-coming events of importance, such as elections, important new laws, political scandals, riots. Those aspects of the government’s political program that would be of interest to US business, such as taxation, privatization, the level of regulation and openness to foreign trade and FDI. The strength of the major opposition parties and their political orientation. Legal or ethical issues of significance: such as how free elections are, how well intellectual property rights are enforced, and what the level of corruption is as shown by the Corruption Perception Index.
• The economic environment. The general level of prosperity (as measured, e.g. by GNP per head). Recent economic growth and inflation. The outlook for growth and/or inflation. The distribution of income including, where of special interest, the size of the middle class. Budget and trade deficits or surpluses. Foreign exchange stability. The country’s global competitiveness ranking and index.
• Market opportunities and threats. These can be drawn from points you have already mentioned in earlier sections. State any recommendations you have for taking advantage of the opportunities and alleviating or counteracting the threats.
3. Concluding recommendation — State the rating you would give business prospects in this country: promising, uncertain or poor. If you would prefer a descriptive word other than one of these three (e.g. “excellent”, “highly negative”) you may give us that. Just be clear. Also:
• If you chose alternative A, and there are certain sectors of the economy where prospects are unusually good or unusually poor, say what they are and why.
• If you chose alternative B, say what entry mode you would recommend – exporting, joint venture, wholly owned subsidiary, or some other – and why.
4. References. — Remember that good information is crucial to a good analysis and review what Lesson 1.2 has to say about resources.
• You must have at least 10 substantial references, at least 5 of them from current news sources.
List the sources you have used by author, title, publisher and date using whichever citation style you are used to or prefer. Use the APA method.
• Make use of in-text citations, using the brief, in-text format of the APA method.
• For articles found on the internet, make sure that you follow the guidelines that your chosen citation style lays down for such sources. The URL alone is not adequate.
• You may include two interviews with persons knowledgeable of the country. They are not to be counted among the 10 minimum number of sources, but be sure to give their full names and contact information in your list of references.
• Do not include your References in your page count.
Formatting and other requirements for the Written Report
1. Formatting: Length should be 8 to 10 pages double spaced. Exclude from the page count your title page and table of contents, large tables, maps charts, list of references and appendices. (Photos, graphics and charts are allowed and may help you get across what you want to say, but no points are set aside to give them credit.) Margins should be exactly 1 inch all around (top, bottom, left, right). Font size should be 12 point Times New Roman, 11 point Arial, or the equivalent in other fonts. (11 point Times New Roman is too small, 12 point Arial is too large.)
2. References: See above.
3. Originality. Your own thoughts and assessment of the opportunities and threats to doing business in the country are very important. Plagiarism, meaning copying or using other people’s work without attribution, is strictly prohibited. It is a form of cheating and will lead to a lower grade or failing the whole course, depending on the seriousness of the infraction. So if you quote directly, use quotation marks and mention immediately afterward in parentheses the author (or title) and date of your source.
4. Organization Give a professional look to your report. It must be well organized and edited. Check for clarity, grammar and spelling. Part of your grade depends on how well you write. Remember that written assignments from this course can be included in your writing portfolio.
5. Creativity. Be creative and interesting. Use of graphics is encouraged where appropriate and relevant. Also, always keep in mind the purpose of this report and that you are writing for your boss and other top management of your company as they decide what kind of international business action to take with the country you have chosen.
A reminder: be careful to avoid plagiarism. Internet downloads and any other direct quotation must be indicated with quotation marks and the proper citations given. If you ignore this, at the very least you will be docked points and you could an F for the course. (If you are in any doubt about what constitutes plagiarism, seehttp://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_what_is_plagiarism.html, especially the bullets under “All of the following are considered plagiarism”.)
The space closes at the deadline mentioned in the Course Schedule.
Grading criteria for written report
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Written Report
Relevant, complete, accurate and up-to-date information. Creativity, good writing – including spelling and grammar – and good organization. Good references.
Good executive summary; sensible conclusions and recommendations