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Essay Instructions: This class is International Business/Global Integration

The objective of the country assessment project is to link the concepts learned in class to a more practical scenario. Suppose you work at an American company that wants to expand abroad. Top management assigned you to a team that will research one of the countries (India) the company is
considering. You are asked to conduct several analyses of the country to determine its overall attractiveness and help management decide where to expand to. We have chosen India as our country.

We are using Microsoft Xbox Live as our company.

This is a group project and I am responsible for the middle of the paper, so there does not need to be a introduction or conclusion.

I will list the points that need to be discussed below:

1. Economic system and economic development. What is the economic system of the country? What is the level of economic development? Factors to consider include: gross domestic product (GDP), education level, geography, and infrastructure.

2. Sociocultural environment. What is the official language of your country? Identify the work-related values of your country using Hofstede’s dimensions. What are the implications of these?

3. Regional economic integration. Is the country you are assessing a member of any regional trade agreements? If so, which ones? What are the objectives of the agreement(s) mentioned? How can your company benefit from these?

4. Foreign exchange market. What currency is used in your country? During the past ten years, how stable has the currency been against the U.S. dollar (exchange rate)? What is the average inflation rate? What are the implications of the exchange rate and the inflation rate for your
company?

Essay Instructions: 1) Describe a current example of asymmetric information. Be specific in describing the product or service that is involved. In the example you give, what problem(s) might exist in the market? How might the problem(s) be corrected or mitigated in this example? (150 words & online reference)
2) Describe one unique source of risk inherent in international investments. Can this risk be managed, and if so, how? In addition to the risk you describe, identify one additional complexity that might arise when multinational corporations consider capital projects on a global basis. How might the complexity you describe be managed? (150 words)
3) Your text lists "differences in cultural and religious philosophies" as a risk that is faced by multinational corporations. Find one example of a cultural or religious philosophy in another country that might affect the way an American company would conduct business in that country. (Pretend that this question answered two different students, 150 words each (total of 600 words) and one online reference)

Thank you.

Essay Instructions: Answer the following questions in the paper for 3 different time periods of significant economic change in mexico.
1. what type of economic system is it? how does it operate?
2.How does the econmic system relate to the political structure?
3.How does it relate to the social structure?
4.what does the economic system mean to a poor family?
5.What does it mean to a middle class family? and wealthy family?
6.what does the economic system mean to a corporation?
7.what is th makeup of the capital base, labor base, and land base?
8.who controls the capital and land markets?
9.how do history and economics interrelate?
10.what is the prognosis for the future?
11.if you were a peace corps worker advising the government, what would your advice be?
12.what are the prospects of an american company seeking to establish operations under that economic system?

Essay Instructions: Please use article provided or pick a journal article of your choice relating to the Human Resources field study and critique. Ensure article is not more than two years old.

The object of your critique is to describe how the study followed or failed to follow the criteria for good research. Speculate on which of the writer's conclusions were warranted and which were not. Please include the following topics in your critique of the selected research article:

-Study design
-Problem or objective
-Literature review
-Population sampling for study
-Measurement
-Data collection methods and analysis
-Analysis
-Limited and justifiable conclusions

. If possible use Exploring Research (seventh edition) by Neil J. Salkind as a reference

Article for Critique:

(c) 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
For a case study in the volatile life cycle of information-based companies, the news last week of a planned sale of insurance operations in Asia may not sound as compelling as forecasting the next revenue stream from Facebook or divulging the technical specs of the iPad.
But the company founded in Shanghai in 1919 as American Asiatic Underwriters was built on the then-rare premise that better information was the key to better business. Over time, it became the biggest insurance company in Asia and a global powerhouse--until it grew so large and complex that it didn't have enough information to control its own risks.
American Asiatic Underwriters is better known by the name of the company it became, AIG. AIG got the biggest bailout of a private company after its financial products group got caught in the credit crunch of 2008. AIG's colorful story deserves telling now that it has to sell its original business--and its only apparent growth driver--to pay back taxpayers. Prudential has offered $35.5 billion for AIG's Asian operations.
AIG is a rare large American company founded and largely grown elsewhere. Founder Cornelius Vander Starr was the first American to start a company in China that became a global success. His original inspiration, almost a century ago, was the insight that as people live longer, policyholders outlive actuarial life expectancies, lowering insurance claims. His was the first foreign company to sell life insurance to the Chinese.
In 1935, Starr was featured in Fortune magazine for having profits estimated to be as large as any U.S.-based insurer. "This money is earned upon a sociological premise, that the standards of living and hygiene of the Chinese middle classes are improving, with a consequent decline in the death rate," Fortune explained. "Indeed, since Chinese statistics are all but nonexistent, the success of Mr. Starr's American Asiatic Underwriters . . . is perhaps the best available proof that the death-rate decline in China is a reality."
The company didn't always make the right call. At first, Starr thought that Mao and the communists would leave freewheeling Shanghai alone. Instead, his managers were jailed and company property was confiscated.
"Our companies were wrung dry like dishrags until we had lost everything," his country manager, Charles Miner, told Time magazine in 1956 when he managed to escape the country after bribing communist officials.
Still, the company went on to develop a specialty in risk analysis and was a pioneer in the creation of insurance products to limit political risk. These included policies to protect companies against expropriation and the risk that their currency could no longer be converted due to changes in government rules.
Former AIG executive Ron Shelp recalls how he created a unit to compete with the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corp. by selling insurance focused on political risk. The company gathered data "to insure a wide assortment of risks--from a baseball team wanting protection against rainstorms to the cargo of a Czech ship carrying refugees from Vladivostok to Europe," Mr. Shelp writes in his book "Fallen Giant."
Starr's successor, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, helped reopen China, where he was a frequent visitor in the 1980s as economic reform began. He bought from an art dealer the original carved doors that had been part of the Summer Palace in Beijing, then donated them to China.
AIG was eventually accepted as such an old friend of China that in 1998 it was allowed to return to its pre-Mao headquarters in Shanghai.
Mr. Greenberg had the foresight and diplomatic skills to help return capitalism to China. But when then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer went after Mr. Greenberg on an alleged accounting violation, the AIG board felt obliged to toss him out in 2005. Mr. Spitzer never did file criminal charges against Mr. Greenberg and the charges at the heart of a civil case lodged against the man who led AIG since 1968 were eventually dropped.
Opinions differ on whether or not he could have prevented the later enormous losses in the company's financial products group. The group badly underestimated the collapse of asset-backed securities in the fall of 2008--a fatal failure to understand risk.
Ironies abound. A company built on taking prudent risks was upended through imprudent risk taking. A company that sold policies to protect against expropriation overseas was taken over by Washington. A company with entrepreneurial roots in prewar Shanghai ends up owned by a risk-averse U.S. government willing to sell prime assets such as the Asian operations.
Meantime, Mr. Greenberg now runs an insurance company called C.V. Starr & Co., which has been hiring former AIG executives. Its headquarters are in New York, but field offices include Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.
Credit: By L. Gordon Crovitz