 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. So the first resource we'll look at is Europa World Plus, and this is a great resource if you know nothing about your country and need basic good encyclopedic like information. So really good resource we need to know like history, political conditions, history of the economy, statistics of your country and things like that. So the way it works, you just go up here and basically select your country. And for my example, I will use India here. So find India there in the list, click go, and it takes us to the India homepage, if you will, within Europa World Plus here. So you can see there's all kind of information here on finance, government politics. There's a nice country profile here, which gives you basic kind of land, climate, things like that that you can get there. If we go back, one, you can see there is all kinds of stuff on history. Loads and loads and loads and loads of history information about India there. What I like, particularly for doing a kind of a country analysis kind of assignment, is I'll really like these country statistics. It's a good place to go in and say, well, I'm looking for things on trade statistics, and here is external trade. And we go in there and we see what kind of information is available for us. Now, this resource is updated at least annually, at least once a year. And so you can see there's all kinds of information within here. Now, one thing to be careful of, you'll notice that this actually is in the Indian currency here. So you don't want to necessarily compare that to like US dollars. So you want to make sure you're careful when comparing or when notating how much, for example, their imports of animal and vegetable oils were in 2010, 2011. So you want to be careful of that sort of thing. So all kinds of stuff you can get for nice statistics within here. You know, nice things as far as exchange rates, information on principal industries, things like that. All within one easy to use place called Europa World Plus. The next resource is called Country Watch. This is yet another place to get good, general country specific information here. And the way it works, once you click the login link from our website, it'll take you to here where you can then select your country. And I will once again choose India here, and it'll take us to the country homepage, if you will, here within Country Watch. And you can see on the front page here we get some country wire or recent news of your country. Get a nice map here, which you could use in a PowerPoint presentation. Just make sure you cite where you get the actual information from. If we go down, we get some key data, including some population information, religion, things like that, okay? So lots of good information you can find there. On the left-hand side, we get things like political conditions, you know, how politically stable is the country. And I want to make this just a touch larger so we can see a little bit better here within the screen. If we go down, there's things like political stability, how stable is the area, which might impact how well you're able to do business in the area. And you'll see it gives rankings comparing to other countries in the world as well. There's a nice information here on economic conditions within the country. So it'll talk about the GDP of the country, how fast the economy is growing or not, issues affecting the economy, things like that. So we're getting more into like a business perspective here, rather than just like, you know, a history of the country, things like that. Within the investment overview section, there's a nice little area here for the investment climate. This is a great place to look for information on how open the country is to foreign investment in the country. Is it open to foreign investment from all countries or just specific countries? And what kind of countries or industries are looking to be open to? So a great place to look and you can kind of see things like, you know, how transparent the regulatory system is, different industries they offer, their technology infrastructure, things like that as well. Finally, under the social overview section, I'm just kind of hitting some of the high points, there's all kinds of good information you can find in here. There is a nice section within here for cultural etiquette. And this gives you basically what's referred to as cultural do's and taboos. What to do and what not to do in a particular country. And this can be useful to business researchers because obviously in business, you're going to shake a lot of hands, you're going to pat people in the back, you're going to be in business meetings, you're going to be out to dinner with people, you're probably going to go and give them a gift, things like that. So you want to make sure that you know how to treat people in another country and how you can expect to be treated as well. So for example, we have things like how to deal with titles, you know, how do you address someone you meet for the first time, right? Things like that. So also I've got a bad habit of doing both of these. One should avoid standing with one's hands and one's hips. I do that a lot, particularly when I'm teaching a class as this stance may be interpreted as angry, aggressive posture, or things like it's don't point your finger at people. So I do that on occasion. So you shouldn't do that as well. So all kinds of information to learn what not to do or what to do when dealing with people in your particular country. So lots of information within here within CountryWatch. Once again, it's all on the left hand side of the database there. The next resource we'll look at is a free resource, a fantastic resource called Global Edge. And if you're doing country information research, the best way to get started here is to go down under country insights, and then choose your country there in the middle of the page there. So we will choose India, right here in the center, click go and it takes us to all kinds of information we can find on our country here. So we just want general statistics. Here's all kinds of information on the economy, things like that. Now you may notice that some of this data here also we found in the first resource we talked about Europa World Plus. And in some cases Europa World may actually have more recent data than what's available here and vice versa. This may have more recent data in some categories than Europa has. So you may have to use both resources when you're looking at data like that. We get information on the economy, how well it's doing, things like that. There's some information for history, good resource for that. There's information on culture. And these basically give you things like you know what to wear, guidelines for business dress, things like that. So good general information on how to how to dress for business, how to keep appointments, how to what kind of gifts you should give in to a person in India or your country, things like that. So all kinds of good information you can find there. There's nice information for trade statistics. So here are some of the principal trading partners, what the value is and things like that in a nice graphical format, things like that. So you can see this is the last update in 2010. It says updated annually. It's been a little bit longer than a year since then. So you may have to look for other resources. For example, Europa World has more recent information than what's available in this particular resource. But Global Edge is a great resource to get started with as well when when analyzing a particular country in order to ascertain how well it is to do business in. So so there you go. Intersource Country Insights is a resource here from the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. And it's basically good really good for cultural specific information, business cultural kind of information. So we're going to go and select our country and then choose choose India here. All right. And it takes us to information here. Now to be honest with you, this information up here at the top, we can already find in all the other resources we've talked about already. What I like to come to intersource for are these culture information down here below. And you see there's things like information on preferred managerial qualities or things like how to handle conflicts in the workplace. These are all really, really interesting in looking at how to deal with workplace issues in another country. So for example, if you have a work related problem with a colleague, do you confront him or her directly? In this case, this basically says you should call a meeting with your colleague and confront him or her directly. But you don't want to embarrass this person in front of a whole conference room of other employees. So you don't want to do that. But basically it tells you what to do. You'll notice this is written from a Canadian perspective. That's okay. It's not that different from what the US may, how the US or people from America would interact with folks from India as well. So it's still a good resource, even though it does says from a Canadian perspective. But it's really good for this kind of business cultural information kind of things. Conflicts in the workplace, how to motivate local colleagues, preferred managerial qualities, what people see in a leader, how do they regard seniority or education or professional status or background, things like that. So all good information you need to know if you're going to be a manager or a leader or do business in another country. The next look out here is passport GMID. When you get to passport, the first thing you have to do is scroll down and accept their terms of use. Basically you're saying you're going to use it for school work and not to make a bunch of money off of the resource. So here we're going to go and click accept. And it's going to take us to the passport GMID homepage here. So one of my favorite resources for the OPI assignment in here is the consumer lifestyle reports in passport GMID. And to get to these consumer lifestyle reports, you go to countries and consumers and then click on consumer trends and lifestyles. And on the next page here, you can actually go in and say I want to under all analysis, let's change that to consumer lifestyles and then choose our geography there. And we'll choose India and then click go. And this is going to take us to the consumer lifestyles report for India. Now what I like about this, particularly for the business aspect of this doing business report is this working habits and working conditions and things like that. So all kinds of good information here on women, the workplace, working conditions, commuting, things like that. So a great place to look for that kind of information. You may also find other information down the left-hand side as well. For example, consumer confidence, how how is your product going to sell in India, things like that. If people aren't too happy with the way the economy is going, things like that. And you can kind of see there's all kinds of information left inside for eating habits, drinking habits, health and wellness, smoking, shopping, things like that. But primarily the consumer confidence area and also the working habits section would be good for your doing business section of your report. Another way you can use passport GMIN is go under countries consumers and click on economy finance and trade. And this will take us to the economy finance and trade homepage here, where we have a couple of options what we can choose from what we can do is actually go under all analysis here. And you can I like these country briefings, country profiles in this monthly economic reviews. Let's just do the country briefing to get a little quick information here. Choose our geography. We'll just do India there in the list and then click go. And it'll take us to basically a kind of a quick country briefing risk and vulnerabilities of what's going on in India, the major components of the economy, things like that. So good information there. If that's not the information you're looking for, you can also go under analysis country profile and change this to India as well. Click go here and we get a country profile from passport GMIN on our country there. So here we have, you know, things that talk about, you know, GDP, things about inflation, you know, get some facts and figures of the country, political structure, last elections, political stability and risk, international issues, all kinds of good information you can find within there in that report there. The last resource though definitely not least is called business source complete. I'm blessed that this one lasts because if you don't use the other resources first, you may just be staring at this blank search box. And as an example, you want to have additional terms to search in addition to just your country. If we go in and just type in India in here and do a search for India, we're going to get a whole lot of stuff, right? We get what says 146,000 articles, way too many things. So what we're going to use is these other search terms or search boxes here. So let's just do, let's try to do business climate here and see if we get something there. So do business climate, we get 50 results there, right? Or we can do or business culture. Let's see what we get there. So we get 126 articles just by looking for that. Now if you want to limit that down just to magazines, or if you want to limit by date, you can go over here on the left-hand side and say, let's limit to the past, I don't know, the past six years, maybe we'll update that. We get 84 articles that way. If you want to limit to just newspapers and magazines, which may be a little bit easier to read, we can do that and click update there as well. And so now we're down to 24 articles from the last six years about India and my topic there. So you probably want to change your topic to something that may be more relevant to your paper, but those are just the terms that I've thought of when doing my search there, but you can kind of see what's available within here. If you like the article, if you click on the article here, it'll give you more information about the article, give you an abstract, which is basically a summary of the article. And then in general, you'll find the PDF full text linked within here, which if you click there will take you to the actual article here in, here in Business Source Complete there. So a great way to find full text information in Business Source Complete from a variety of magazines, newspapers, trade publications and things like that. So all kinds of good information you can find there in Business Source Complete. Hope for this helped 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. Be glad to help you any way you can. Take care and best of luck with your research.