Global Market Evaluation: A Longitudinal Efficiency Assessment Approach

Both experienced and novice international business practitioners may need to examine many country ranking reports on a frequent basis. Most of these reports focus on certain socio-economic variables and compute country rankings with a weighted average method, which does not distinguish between likely causes (i.e. inputs) and consequences (i.e. outputs). Through data envelopment window analysis (DEWA), the publicly accessible globalEDGE™ data were employed to compute the relative efficiency index for 22 countries from 2002 to 2009. Subsequently, the trend (averages) and the consistency (correlations) of relative country efficiency along the passage of years were examined to segment those countries into three groups: the “consistent performers,” the “sliding performers,” and the “improving performers” groups. This segmentation scheme may facilitate business practitioners when they develop their global expansion strategy. This paper introduces a complementary yet different longitudinal efficiency which could help multinational corporations’ top management teams and government decision makers evaluate the continuous performance of output/input efficiency.