 Hey there, I'm Chad Boninger. I'm the Business Librarian at Ohio University Libraries. This video is designed to help the OPI, those students in the Ohio program for intensive English, do research on how to do business in another country. They're researching country facts and also information about a country's culture, business climate, business communication issues, things like that. So this video showcases some of the key resources to help them in doing the research for that project. So here you go. The first resource we'll be looking at to give you a general overview of your country is Europa World Plus. And as you can see right here in the description, it is an online version of the Europa World Yearbook, which means it comes out once a year. So it's updated quite frequently. So what we're going to do here is go up and look for our country here. So basically we'll drop down and we'll use India as our example so we can scroll down until we find our country. Click on India and then click Go. This will take us to the India homepage where we'll find general information such as the area and population, GDP of the country, general government and facts and things like that. So this has a lot of information. For example, if you're looking for history of your country, you can click on history over here on the left-hand side and you'll see that there is lots and lots and lots and lots of information here about your country. So pretty much everything you need to know quickly about your country and its history will be there. A good place to look for that kind of information. Information about the economy likewise can be found underneath the economy link on the left side. And that will give us information about the economy, how the economy is growing, things like that. Lots of information about the GDP and things like that. So really good information that you can find that way. There is a nice country statistics section here where you can go in and say, I'm looking for information about the country's industries. If you click on the country's industry link under country statistics, and there you'll find information about what kind of industries they are involved in and information like that. Likewise, we go back over here on the left-hand side. If you want to know things like external trade, this will give you information about some of the country's principal or main trading partners, as well as some of the things they export, some of the things they sell to other countries or import, things they bring in from other countries. One thing you want to pay attention to is generally this information is recorded in the country's native currency. So this is not in U.S. dollars. So depending on your country, you may want to look at that and make sure you understand what currency that they are using and looking at that information. So lots of good information that you can find in Europa World Plus. Those are just a few of the highlights there, but you can definitely find a lot more information in there for your OP country analysis project. The next resource we'll look at is Global Edge. And this is really a nice resource and a lot of people think this is their favorite resource for doing a project such as what the OP students are doing and basically collecting statistics and facts about their country in order to better determine how to do business in that country. So the way this works, if you scroll down and change this to Buy Country and then go over and choose your country right here in the center of the page, and once again we will use India for our example. Once you've selected your country, you can then click Go. And this will take us to the India homepage in Global Edge. And what this will allow you to do is you can see it gives you an introduction to the country. And we have click links to some of the main information on the website here. And so a lot of these things will link you to some other really good resources. For example, this Country Commercial Guide, if we click there, will take us to another page where we can click on this Country Commercial Guide India. And this page actually would come out of the US Commercial Service. So this is going to tell us how to do business in India. And it's a PDF, so I will run the PDF here. And so here we have a guide on doing business in India. Now there may not be a link for every single country you're doing like this, but if there is, be sure to click on it because you may find good information that talks about how to do business in India, the investment climate, things like that. So some really good resources that you can see for your country. And these are generally, this one's 105 pages, obviously pretty long, but it's linked here so you can actually click on the link and it'll get you to the section quicker that you're really looking for. Back to our India homepage here in Global Edge. You'll notice there's lots of statistics here. So here we have statistics on India. For example, budget, here's GDP, GDP growth rate, things like that. Information about imports and exports. You'll see there is some trade statistics here, which would give you information for some of the principal trading partners. Similar to the information we found in Europa, the previous database we were looking at. You'll see there's information on the economy. So you can really spend a lot of time in here getting good information about your country. There is information on risk, so this gives you the risk assessment, how risky is it to do business in that country, in this case India. You'll see there's also a nice culture section. And this gives you information on things like what kind of stuff should you wear in doing business. Should you wear a suit and tie? Should you wear a t-shirt and blue jeans? What sort of things are available? In this case, jeans with a t-shirt or a short sleeve shirt are acceptable as casual wear. So if we were just going to go meet a business person at a bar for a beer maybe or go to a ball game or something, we could probably wear a t-shirt and blue jeans. So you see things like what sort of gifts should you give to a business person. Things like that, including things like what color to wrap the present in. For example, here in America it's okay to wrap wedding presents and things like that with white paper. We probably wouldn't want to do that in India because it's not a good color to wrap your paper or wrap your present with. So this gives you a quick overview of what you can find in Global Edge. Lots of good information in here. Lots of statistics, information about the economy, things like that. So it's a really good resource that will work nicely with what you can use with Europa as well. The next resource we'll look at is a database called Country Watch. And this one works basically the same way as the other two in that you'll look for a bar just like this and then select your country and the list of countries there. And once again we're using India as our example. So we will choose India here in our list. Once you do that, it takes you to again the country's homepage where you'll find information about a map. You'll find a flag, you'll find some recent news of your country. You'll find key data which gives you population and things like that. And then some fast facts. So some good information that you can find right here on the homepage of Country Watch for your country. On the left-hand side is how you navigate the information in here. So things that I would look for in here that are unique to Country Watch. Now you can spend a lot of time looking for information in here. And if this is your favorite resource to use, that's okay to use this one a lot. But you'll probably find some of the information is going to be the same information that you found in Global Edge or in Europa. Some things that are unique to this database you'll find down here if we look at things like investment climate. This is a good section within here. So this gives you information about how open a country is to investment from companies from foreign countries. So a good information that you can find there when trying to understand how easy it is to do business in your particular country. If we scroll down, there will be other information that looks at things like understanding the people. So this gives information about the different cultures that live in India. On the left-hand side again, there is a cultural etiquette section. And this gives you what they refer to as cultural do's and taboos. What to do in India and what not to do in India when you talk to people, when you meet them, when you shake hands, when you meet them for business, things like that. So for example, let's see, here's an example. One should avoid standing with one's hands on one's hips as this stance may well be interpreted as an angry, aggressive posture. So if you are someone who has a habit of standing with your hands on your hips, you probably want to avoid that in order to avoid making people from India feel uncomfortable. So you don't want to do that, nor do you want to point with your finger because that's also a bad thing. So nor should you wink at someone with your eyes. So that would be also another bad thing that you want to avoid as well. Okay, so there's lots of good information that you can have in here. There's information on the status of women, which is kind of nice and this gives you information on how women are treated in a particular country. Which if you're going to send women, business women to a country, you want to understand how well they may be received in that country. So lots of good information that you can find in here in CountryWatch. You'll also notice I've kind of skipped over some of these sections up here, but you could go in and look at political conditions, things like that. Or you can look at economic conditions as well, which will give you information as far as how the political environment is in India, or information about how the economy is doing. So lots of good information that you can find here in CountryWatch. The next resource that we're looking at here is Country Insights. And what this will give you is lots of good factual information about countries, but also good cultural information about particular countries. So once again it works the same as the other places do. We'll just select a country here and we'll go down and choose India once again as our example. And once we get here, we have all these facts here. For example, geography, politics, things like that. We can actually find that information in the other resources that we've been looking at. So I'm not really going here to Country Insights for those kind of information. What I want to look for is this cultural information. So this is more unique to this resource. So this is information that this resource has that other resources do not have. So for example, if you want to know things like how to resolve conflicts in the workplace. So for example, if you get into an argument with a colleague in India, one of your business partners or things like that, how do you resolve that? So this will tell you how to resolve conflicts in the workplace. Because conflicts happen, you do occasionally get into arguments over things at work, and so this is how you deal with that. So this gives you information about that. Likewise, information on preferred managerial qualities. What do people from India prefer their managers to have? How do they look upon managers with lots of education, or do they need lots of experience, things like that? So good information that you can find there as well. The next resource we'll look at is Passport. And this one can be a little bit difficult to use at times. So for this database, I'm only going to go to really one section in the database here. What we're going to do is go under countries and consumers, and then click on economy, finance, and trade. So we'll click right there, and that's going to take us to this economy, finance, and trade page here. So what we're going to do first is we're going to under the all analysis, we're going to select country briefing. And then we will choose our country. So we'll click on the all geographies, and here they organize things by the region of the world, so you have to know where your country is. So you can kind of click the little plus sign here and drop down, and we happen to see that India is in the Asia-Pacific region. So we click on that, and once we have these two selected, you'll notice that the bar is now blue, which means we can click on it. We can't click on the gray bar, we can only click on the blue bar. So once you have two things selected here, you do that and you click go. Now this gives you a report that talks about, and I'm just going to click on the whole report here so we can see the whole thing in my screen. This gives us a report on how risky or vulnerable it is to do business in India. So here we have things that address the major components of the economy, talking a lot about their information and how their GDP and things like that. And this analyzes things like their GDP, their political risk, how bad is corruption in the area, things like that. What's the information about unemployment? Lots of information that you can find in here. So what's the political stability like? How does the country deal with the external sector? Things like that. So good information that you can find in there for your country. I'm going to go back one page and go back to our original economy, finance and trade. And once again, if you forgot how to get here, I'm just going to go back to the homepage and repeat this process so we're all familiar with that. If you go under countries and consumers, economy, finance and trade, and for the previous report we did country briefing, for this one I'm going to do country profile. This will give us a different report. We're going to repeat the same process. We're going to go under geography, Asia Pacific, and there's India. And then click go. And this gives us lots of statistics and things like that. If we click the show whole report, here is our India country profile with key points, with facts, information about the government, political stability, international issues, lots and lots of information that you can use here, economic prospects, the business environment. So we have lots of information in here for understanding how to do business with the country. And so here we have, you know, here's your GDP, things like that. So all kinds of statistics. So a great resource, almost a one-stop shop for understanding how to do business with your country, how to do, how to understand its economy, things like that. The final database we'll be looking at for the OP country assignment is business source complete. And I'm showing you this one last because I think it's important to use this one last. Not because it is not important, but because you have these three blank search boxes here. And if you start with this one first and you don't know anything about your country, then you may have a hard time filling in what's to go in this search box. As an example, if we just go and search for India and do a search in here, this is going to get us a whole lot of articles, 151,000 articles, okay, which is way too many. So what we want to try to do is actually look for other topics we might put in these other boxes to get that number down to a more manageable number. So this is where you would go in and say, well you know what? In that passport database they talked about corruption. And I want to know more articles about corruption or more articles about corruption in business or things like that in India. So what we can do is just search for corruption. In this case it finds the term forest there and then click search. And so now we get down to 793 articles. Okay, now a lot of these may be, you know, here's one from the Journal of Management and Public Policy. That's okay, but let's just say you just want a newspaper article or you want a magazine article. So what I would recommend doing is just limit over here in the left-hand side to newspapers. And I'm going to choose trade publications too. That's a good resource to look at and magazines. And then we'll click update. Okay, so now we find good information here. You can see our date range is to 1984. Let's change that to like 2009, the last four years or so. And if we want to, we can also limit to full text and do update. So now we're down to 172 articles that deal with India and corruption. Okay, so this particular article here, you can see where it pulls out corruption. If you click on the title here, it will give us information about the author, which source it's coming from. And you'll have an abstract, which is basically a quick summary of the article in most cases. And in this case, we have the article down below. Or if you like, in many cases, you'll see there's a PDF link here, which would also... I'm going to click this link here, which will also find the actual article in PDF format. So the picture of the article, how it would have appeared in the regular print magazine. So as you can see, this actually gives you some of the pictures from the magazine and how the actual article appeared in the magazine. The nice thing about this, if you like this article, you can go over here and email it to yourself. And it will send it to you as an email attachment, things like that. So great information that you can find here in Business Source Complete. So what we found was we found newspapers, magazines, and trade publications all about corruption in India from 2009 to the current date, 2013. And we only told it to find full text articles, and that found the articles that way. Okay, so that's a great way to look for information on your companies, on your countries. And here's one for business environment, top risk as an example. And this one here is not available in PDF full text down here, but if you go over here, or HTML full text down here, but if you want you can click on the PDF full text there and once again get the article from the PDF full text that way. So here's the actual article from that particular citation. Hope for this helps you understand some of the resources available to you in researching doing business in another country. Should you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog. I'll be glad to help you any way I can. Take care and best of luck with your research.