IB 600: International Management

Findings from an international study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture -- includes country comparison data.

Find economic, social, political, and demographic descriptions for every nation in the world.

Demographic and socioeconomic statistics for several hundred countries and territories in the world.

Statistical gathering agencies in foreign governments.

The Berlin based NGO Transparency International has published the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) annually since 1995 ranking countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys. The CPI defines corruption as "the misuse of public power for private benefit." The CPI ranked 178 countries "on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt)."

The CPI draws on 13 different surveys and assessments from 10 independent institutions. The institutions are the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, Global Insight, International Institute for Management Development, Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank. The 13 surveys/assessments are either business people opinion surveys or performance assessments from a group of analysts.

The Ease of Doing Business Project, launched by the World Bank and the International Finance Group in 2002, looks at companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle and ranks economies from 1 to 183. For each economy the ranking is calculated as the simple average of the percentile rankings on each of the 10 topics included in the index in Doing Business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and getting electricity

The Index of Economic Freedom is a series of 10 economic measurements created jointly by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. Its stated objective is to measure the degree of economic freedom in the world's nations. The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal created the Index of Economic Freedom in 1995. According to Heritage, the creators of the Index took an approach similar to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations that basic institutions that protect the liberty of individuals to pursue their own economic interests result in greater prosperity for the larger society.

It measures ten components of economic freedom, assigning a grade in each using a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the maximum freedom. The 10 economic freedoms are grouped into four broad categories or pillars of economic freedom:
1. Rule of Law (property rights, freedom from corruption);
2. Limited Government (fiscal freedom, government spending);
3. Regulatory Efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom); and
4. Open Markets (trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom).

Each of the freedoms within these four broad categories is individually scored on a scale of 0 to 100. A country’s overall economic freedom score is a simple average of its scores on the 10 individual freedoms. Detailed information about the methodology used to score each component is contained in the appendix can be accessed from the link above.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide for 165 independent states and two territories—The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based on their scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is then itself categorized as one of four types of regime: “full democracies”; “flawed democracies”; “hybrid regimes”; and “authoritarian regimes”.