How to Do a Country Study?

1 Introduction
There are more than two hundred countries in the world. Developments in all these countries are
regularly studied by economists, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists. Academics of
these different disciplines study a country for their own intellectual needs and therefore, they study
them from their own perspectives. Each discipline relies on its own methods and tools and collects its
own data. In addition to these studies, many international organizations entrusted with specific tasks
routinely carry out country studies every year. For a specific country, developments within that
country and the current environments it faces are studied by many other domestic institutions,
notably by the federal government and the central bank. As a result of all these, even for a single
country, a plethora of reports are generated every year.

Before studying a particular country directly, it is important for you all to be familiar with the
techniques of a country study. As different disciplines may have different techniques, one must clearly
specify the perspective here. In a business school, one needs to study a country from the business
perspective. This means: while our primary focus will be on the economy, we cannot ignore other
human factors, especially factors that can affect business. Further, even among business, the details
of the perspective may vary. When a multinational firm is seeking investment options, it would like to
juxtapose a country to its potential competitors. Domestic firms, however, would like to know more
about the future economic environment. Although these details may vary, fortunately due to
continuous efforts by various individuals and organizations, we now have broad templates for both
the approaches. In this course, our primary focus will be on the second approach, although even in
this approach, benchmarking of the domestic economy with the best economies many be necessary
in many cases. Accordingly, this article reviews the broad template of a country study from both these
business perspectives.

Section 2 identifies the major areas covered in a country study. Section 3 discusses the major data
sources in the public domain. Section 4 briefly covers the tools and methods. Finally, Section 5
presents and critically evaluates a few major benchmark templates of country studies.

2 Major Areas Covered in a Country Study

In order to do a good country study, we would like to ask a lot of questions on the following areas:

i) Evaluation of Standard of Living: What is the standard of living in the country?

ii) Evaluation of Resources: What resources do the country have? Can these resources be more
effectively used to improve its level of living?
iii) Stability Evaluation:
a. Economic Risk Evaluation: Is the current standard of living stable? If not, what are the
upward or downward risks? Can the existing resources better utilized to have more
stability in the level of living?

1
Prepared on behalf of Business Environment Area by Professor Kaushik Bhattacharya

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 b. Political Risk Evaluation: What are the major interest groups in the country? What is
the nature of interaction among these interest groups? What are the institutional
processes of bargaining among these groups? What are the impacts of these groups
on the policymaking process? Could there be conflicts among these interest groups in
near future?

Note that the first two areas and the first part of the third area clearly fall under the discipline of
economics. It is the second part of the third item in the above list that takes us beyond the realm of
economics. This fourth topic falls in the interdisciplinary areas of economics with political science,
sociology and social psychology. In a SWOT framework, the first may reflect both strength as well as
weakness, the second two mostly reflects opportunities before the country and the third, threats.

A pre-condition of a good country study is a collection of vast amount of data on all the above areas.
Not only should we have the data on the current period, to analyse trend and interaction among
variables, we would also need historical time series data on many variables on these areas.
Interrelationship among these variables may be examined through a set of equations.

For many topics of interest, quantification is difficult. In such cases, data may be collected as answer
to questions in binary format (e.g., 0/1 or yes/no format) or in a Lichter scale (e.g., strongly
agree/agree/neutral/do not agree/disagree strongly). Often answers on some of these questions are
aggregated into a small set of indices, either by counting scores or by statistical techniques like
Principal Components Analysis (PCA).

We now discuss the major areas of focus of a country study one by one.

(i) Evaluation of Standard of Living

It is well known that income is one of the most important determinants of demand. Aggregate income
in a country is not only a determinant of demand, but also of market size. In the context of a country,
various measures of GDP reflect different aspects of standard of living.

GDP: Value added / Market Size

GDP per capita: a measure of current standard of living

There are two big problems with these measures. If you want to compare level of living over time,
they may give the wrong picture because prices change constantly. Also, if you want to compare the
level of living across countries, they are not much of use because GDP is expressed in local currencies.

GDP at current and constant prices: what are the uses?

Per-capita GDP at current and constant prices: what are the uses?

GDP at PPP

Per-Capita GDP at PPP

Limitation of GDP as a measure of standard of living

One may also note that income elasticity of demand for food is also a very good measure of level of
living. This measure, as it is an elasticity measure, is unit less. However, for a single country, this

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measure is calculated from survey data. As cross-country survey data may not be readily available,
this is rarely used for comparison.

(ii) Resources
Every country has some resources. In fact, every country in the world is unique in terms of its resource
combinations. For better policymaking, a proper and professional valuation of its resources is a must.

Analysis of resources plays an important role in a country analysis because these resources are utilized
in production. They are the natural capital using which other capitals are made. They contribute
towards fiscal revenue, income and poverty reduction. Sectors related to natural resources are often
the major sources of employment in a country.

Even if some resources are currently not utilized, they could be utilized in future production.
Accordingly, resources play an important role in assessing strategic opportunities before an economy.
It is interesting to note that innovation is defined in terms of alternative use of the resources in one’s
possession. Developments in another part of the world or investment of the country in research and
development may enable the country to use its resources more effectively

The resources of a country could be land (especially arable land), labour / human resource (especially
cheap or educated/skilled labour), minerals and oil and gas. Access to superior technology could be
an important resource as it is a determinant of export to other parts of the world. Similarly, solid and
mighty financial structure could be a resource because it may enable a country to be a supplier of
capital in the international market. Even history, reputation (in particular, business reputation) and
soft power could be a resource if skilfully managed by policymakers.

The following are some examples on how resources may affect a country study:

 Abundant availability of arable land in a country would imply huge possibility of expansion of
agricultural activity in the country. If land is abundant but non-arable, the country must think
of other use of the land. For example, Russia has huge amount of land in its possession. The
Eastern part of Russia, which is rich with different minerals but relatively underdeveloped has
huge potential for growth. Attempts are currently being made by the Russian government to
develop these areas with the involvement of other “friendly” countries with Russia. Similarly,
many countries in North Africa have a lot of desert land that are currently barren and bereft
of any development. Technologists in the past had suggested that a possible future use of the
desert area could be solar electricity generation. Important history associated with the land
may indicate a potential for tourism activities. Even specific events conducted every year in a
country may have that potential. The Hajj in Saudi Arabia or the Carnival in Latin America are
examples of such events.
 An important part of a country study are the following two questions: (1) Is the country
independent in terms of food? And, (2) Is the country independent in terms of energy? Note
that being independent in both would mean that the country may not be easily affected by
supply shock.
 Abundant availability of cheap labour would indicate an opportunity for relatively unskilled
industrial activity. Internationally, China used this resource very effectively to grow quickly.
The same strategy is currently being adopted by many other Asian and African countries (e.g.,
Bangladesh). Availability of skilled labour, however, indicates that the country could be better
suited for high-end industrial activities in the value chain. The demographic profile of the
population indicates how long or sustainable these economic activities could be. A young,

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 adult working population would continue to be an economic resource for a long time while an
ageing population may not be so.
 An analysis of oil rich country would almost always be related to the overall state of the oil
market. For example, a study on Saudi Arabia needs to focus a lot of attention on the
developments in the international oil market.
 Access to specific high-end technology like semi-conductors, cryogenic engines, engines of
aeroplanes, gene coding and patented vaccines could be valuable resources of a country.
 Financial power of the country indicates its might as an investor
 Trust, credibility and soft power: Banking business is a good example on how trust and soft
power can make a lot of difference. Trust in the banking system in a country helps the country
to mobilize resources from different parts of the world. As banking business enjoys huge
economies of scale, trust building is a necessary part in this activity. Internationally, banks of
the developed countries in the West can mobilize resources more easily in a global market
place. Because of the trust of lenders, they can also borrow in the international market at a
cheaper rate. Among the Western countries, banks of Switzerland were known internationally
for their fierce loyalty to their customers. Internationally, this loyalty is still a big resource for
Switzerland.

Resources, however, could be a two-edged-sword. If they are not managed properly, they may turn
out to be a bane rather than boon. The relationship between natural resources and economic
development is a hotly debated topic among economists and other social scientists. Many studies had
obtained a negative correlation between natural resource abundance and sustained economic
growth, especially in poor countries. Countries with abundant natural resources like gold, diamond,
uranium, platinum and crude oil had often failed to convert the endowments of nature into better
economic lives for its populace. This has led to the notorious term “resource curse”. Examples of such
countries are Nigeria, Angola and Democratic republic of Congo.

The causes of the resource curse are not yet fully understood. Studies in the past had attributed
factors like rent seeking and corruption, underinvestment in human capital, improper risk
management and social conflict behind the resource curse. In the past, poor resource-rich countries
that cannot defend itself had been targeted by large corporates of other countries. Given the high
stakes involved, the motive of installing proxy governments in these countries by foreign powers
cannot be ruled out.

(iii) Stability Evaluation

a. Economic Risk Evaluation

Economic risk evaluation is based on standard macroeconomic framework and econometric
techniques. Based on this framework, it is easy to identify variables that carry risk implications with
some caveats. As the size of an economy varies from country to country, it is important to convert
them in the form of growth rates or scale them properly with another variable so that the measures
become internationally comparable.

Some of the common macroeconomic indicators used to evaluate economic risk are:

 Inflation

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  Volatility in exchange rate
 Volatility in money and capital market
 Gross fiscal deficit as percentage of GDP
 Government debt as percentage of GDP
 Current account balance as percentage of GDP
 Foreign exchange reserves as a proportion to Import
 Short-term debt as a percentage of GDP
 Non-performing assets as a proportion to overall banking assets

Together, these indicators are supposed to reveal the probability of a macroeconomic or financial
crisis in a country. In practice, it is not easy to answer this question. A very high or low values of each
of these indicator may signal imbalance in an economy. However, it is not clear what exactly could be
a normal range of these variables. Cross-country comparisons may help in terms of benchmarking
assessment, but as these variables are inter-related, it is the combined impact carried out by them
that are more important. The combined impact of all such relevant variables could be estimated
through econometric models. However, models are not precise. Prediction of timing and the scale of
a crisis had proved to be as difficult as prediction of some physical events like earthquake or
turbulence. Further, any estimated model may suffer from two types of errors. It may miss the
prediction of a crisis and it may predict a crisis wrongly. The cost of the second type of wrong
prediction also could be substantial.

b. Political Risk Evaluation

Economic redistribution is one of the most important activities of any government in the world. This
redistribution involves two major issues: (1) who will pay how much to the government (taxes)? And,
(2) who will get how much from the government once the payments are received (subsidies)? Any
policy decision on any of these two by the government leads to gainers and losers in an economy.
Naturally, this aspect of governance creates a lot of differences in opinion in all countries in the world.
As individuals cannot bargain effectively with the government, they form formal or informal forums
or associations and try to put as much pressure on the government as possible for a favourable deal.
The nature of these associations and the type of pressure on the government depend on the economic
and societal structure of the country along with their historical evolution.

Interest Groups

Marx was one of the earliest social thinkers who highlighted the importance of “class” formation.
Marx’s conceptualization of class was based on the production process only. Marx highlighted the
dichotomy of bourgeoisie and proletariat based on this logic. In the modern economy, however, the
distinction between these two classes have become blurred. The modern economy is much more
complex than it was at the time of Marx and the incentive structures of economic agents have changed
substantially.

Interest group identification is one method through which one may now study the interaction of
incentive structure in an economy. Transparency International defines interest groups as:
“… associations of individuals or organisations that on the basis of one or more shared concerns”.
These groups attempt to influence public policy in its favour usually by lobbying members of the
government. It may be noted that this type of lobbying may not necessarily be illegal or unethical.
Transparency International further classifies interest groups into three different types based on their

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motivation: (i) economic, including individual corporations and business organisations;
(ii) professional, including groups such as trade unions and farmers; (iii) public interest, including
human rights groups, environmental groups, among others (also called “cause groups”). For example,
in the context of the US, Avinash Dixit observes the existence of several interest groups like farmers,
senior citizens, cities, declining industries, emerging industries etc. Dixit further observes that
“Political pressure is exerted on behalf of all these groups.” Each group wants to share lesser tax
burden and want to extract as much concessions from the government as possible. Although there is
a huge literature on fiscal policy from the macroeconomic angle, policies in practice often have little
to do with macroeconomic optimization – whatever that optimization means. Rather, what policy that
will be adopted in reality depends on the group-dynamics.

The strategies an interest group will adopt often depends on the governance structure of the country.
In a democracy, interest groups may publish reports, seek media attention, finance candidates in
elections or approach governing elite directly or indirectly through consultants for certain actions.
What strategy an interest group will adopt may also depend on the form of the democracy. In the US
where power is separated and balanced between the executive and the legislature, an interest group
may need to approach both. In parliamentary systems like India, approaching senior ministers may
turn out to be adequate. In an authoritarian system, interest groups must gain the attention of the
dictator or some in his close cabal. As authoritarian governments generally do not encourage formal
group formation, even such actions may be taken through personal or informal networks. Interest
groups’ influence on policy making is not necessarily a corrupt or an illegitimate activity. However, in
extreme cases, a disproportionate influence of interest groups may lead to state capture. In a country
study, an evaluation of interest groups and their bargaining process therefore needs a careful scrutiny.
A typical approach is to develop a framework with a set of questions. One such framework that
involves an analysis of the structure of a country and the process of bargaining it allows along with an
identification of stakeholders and their incentives (Box 1).

Box 1:
Key Questions on Interest Groups in a Structure-Bargaining-Stakeholders-Incentives Framework

Structure
 What are the big economic issues facing this country/sector?
 How does government spend its money and why?
 What are the major contours of society - ethnic, religious, young/old and gender?
Bargaining
 How inclusive or exclusive are bargaining processes? Are any groups marginalized? What is
the role of women?
 What is the `currency’ of bargaining, the mechanisms through which influence happens
(e.g. loyalty, patronage, rents)? How `big’ does the bargain need to be for action to follow?
For example, if
 the Cabinet agrees to something, can change still be stalled by officials, civil servants etc?
When does a bargain become enforceable? At a macro-level we might also want to know:
what kind of political
 settlement are we dealing with (stable/unstable, inclusive/exclusive etc) and what are the
major influences and constraints on it?
Stakeholders
 Who are the stakeholders? How do they organize? Why are they involved?
 How do the stakeholders relate to each other, including beyond the obvious?

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  How do the stakeholders see these issues?
Incentives
 What are the big incentives that might encourage change (debt relief, legacy, security for
certain groups)?
 What are the big disincentives?
 What do we know about how the trade-offs between incentives and disincentives are
normally weighed?

Source: Whaites (2017)

Democracy Indices

As interest group activity depends on the nature of the government, it is important to know the
characterization of the government under study. An important question here is whether the country
concerned is a democracy or it has an authoritarian structure. Democracy, however, is a multi-
dimensional concept. Regular free and fair elections is an important part of any democracy, but that
alone may not be enough.

To understand why, consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose in a democracy, there are two groups.
Group A and B consist of 90 and 10 per cent of the population respectively. If there is open hatred
between these two groups, a free and fair election will lead to an overwhelming win of Group A. Now
suppose that after winning the election, Group A initiates a systematic process of discrimination
against Group B. Would you still call that country a democracy? An extreme form of that discrimination
is genocide. A genocide, even if perpetrated with overwhelming political support, is an absolute no-
no in a democracy. Every democracy codes some fundamental rights, either through law or through
its constitution itself, to protect individuals of all identities. Other institutions like the press or the
judiciary are supposed to be the watchdogs of these rights. These last institutions are run by non-
elected individuals. There are many other institutions that carry out other but similar tasks. The central
bank scrutinizes the economic actions of the government and takes corrective actions if needed. The
Comptroller and Auditor General monitors the internal financial deals of the government to root out
corruption. The universities and think tanks offer policy advices independently.

Any democracy is, therefore, a balance between public opinion and elite control. These balances may
take different forms in different countries. Internationally, institutions that study democracy
recognise this multi-dimensionality. Freedom House and the Economist Group are two such
institutions. The Gastil Index prepared by the freedom house and the Democracy Index prepared by
the Economist Groups are regularly used by political scientists to characterize the government
structure in a country. Both these institutions, measure democracy through a scale. For example, the
Gastil index of democracy is measured in a scale between one and seven. Democracy Index is
measured in a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being a perfect democracy and 1 a tin-pot dictatorship.

The Democracy Index produces a weighted average based on the answers to 60 questions, each one
with either two or three options answers of which are based on expert-assessments and public-
opinion surveys. The questions are grouped into five categories:

 Electoral process and pluralism

 Civil liberties
 Functioning of government
 Political participation
 Political culture

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Each answer is converted to a score, either 0 or 1, or for the three-answer questions, 0, 0.5 or 1. Within
each category, the scores are added, multiplied by ten, and divided by the total number of questions
within the category. The five separate category indices are then averaged to find the overall score for
a given country.

In this context, one must remember any unidimensional measure of a multi-dimensional concept
would be subjective measure at the end of the day. It would simply depend on where one would like
to attach more weights. Because of this multi-dimensionality, nobody really knows what is the ideal
distribution of power between elites and politicians in a democracy. All measures of democracy should
therefore be taken with a pinch of salt. Further, we have data for a limited number of countries and
for a limited time period in human history. Despite all limitations, we can, however, recognise the
extreme cases of elite control and populism. Despite limitations, Gastil Index and Democracy index,
however, are important benchmarks and their wide use makes them important measure in terms of
practical use.

Corruption Indices

Corruption is an important determinant of the strategies of interest groups.

In addition, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by Transparency International is an important

indicator of institutional structure that has some implications for the bargaining process. The CPI ranks
countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. The results are given on a scale of 0
(highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). Transparency International claims that “The sources and surveys
which make up the CPI, ask their respondents questions which are based on carefully designed and
calibrated questionnaires … The CPI contains informed views of relevant stakeholders, which generally
correlate highly with objective indicators, such as citizen experiences with bribery as captured by the
Global Corruption Barometer”.

Systematic Exclusion and Social Conflict: Indices on Inequality and Fragmentation

A major part of the political risk literature attempts to find out possibilities of a social conflict in a
country. A focus of this literature is to identify factors that may lead to social conflict. These factors
could be both economic as well as ethnic in nature.

Among economic factor, economic inequality is a major one. Income inequality in an economy is often
measured by the Gini Coefficient. Gini coefficient is the average deviation of income between all pairs
of individuals scaled by the average income. It is a pure number between 0 and 1, 0 reflecting no
inequality and unity the case where only one person in the economy has positive income and all the
rest as zero.

Micro-level data is needed to calculate the Gini coefficient. Therefore, Gini coefficient is often
estimated from survey data.

In the absence of data on income, one may use the data on consumption.

Index of Fractionalization

Several authors have stressed the importance of ethnic heterogeneity in the context of economic
development. An index that attempts to measure diversity is the index of fractionalization. Suppose
there are K groups in a country with respect to a particular identity, say religion. Let hi be the
population share of the i-th group in the country. The index of fractionalization is then defined as:

F = (h12 + h22 + ... + hK2)

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The maximum value of F is 0.5 for K=2, and h1=0.5 and h2=0.5.

3 Major Primary and Public Data Sources

The details of economic measurements often vary from country to country. The GDDS and SDDS are
attempts of the IMF to standardize macroeconomic measurement. Members of GDDS or SDDS has to
disseminate a fixed set of data on regular basis. Among these two, SDDS is the more demanding one
in nature. Subscription of SDDS indicates good statistical citizenship. All members must commit
simultaneous release and equal access. They must certify the integrity of data. Along with data, all
subscriber countries of SDDS must also disseminate detailed methodologies of data collection and
maintain an advanced data release calendars.

Major sources of data disseminated by the International Monetary Fund are:

 GDDS and SDDS websites

 International Financial Statistics

World Bank Panel Database on Countries

Democracy Index: Data on Various Components

Domestic Sources: Government websites and central bank websites

4 Country Study: Tools and Methods

One of the major requirements in a country study is comparison. This comparison also involves
benchmarking a country with respect to the best. A basic requirement for this is access of relevant
cross-country data. Using the data on any variable, it is easy to obtain the percentile rank of a country
with respect to that variable. For visual appeal, the same data may be presented in terms of graphs or
pictograms.

As an example, consider the benchmarking exercise with respect to the democracy index. A relevant
graph will be a histogram of democracy index of all countries in the world, along with a line or arrow
in the same histogram indicating the position of the country under analysis (Figure 1). The augmented
histogram then reveals the percentile rank of the country with respect to democracy index. In order
to minimize noise, one may consider an average of democracy index of a country for a fixed number
of years (say, five years) as the variable.

Augmented histogram, however, would put equal weight on all countries. A pictogram of a colour
coded world map disseminating a variable will not suffer from this problem. Figure 2 presents one
such colour coded map of democracy index for all countries in the world (Figure 2).

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 Country X

Figure 1: Augmented Histogram

Full democracies 9.01–10 8.01–9.00 No data Flawed democracies 7.01–8.00 6.01–7.00 Hybrid
regime 5.01–6.00 4.01–5.00 Authoritarian regimes 3.01–4.00 2.01–3.00 0–2.00

Source: Economic Intelligence Unit, Economist Group

Figure 2: Map showing countries/territories by Democracy Index score in 2020

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The other major requirement of a country study is forecasting of the variables of interest and
measuring the risks associated with these forecasts. One may use a plethora of models and forecasting
techniques for the variables concerned. Forecasts may be based on regression or time series
techniques like ARIMA for a single variable. One may also estimate a set of equations together and
forecast the system of equations. If these equations also contain policy variables, then the same
models may be used for policy simulations. The risk associated with a forecast may be associated by
estimating ARCH or GARCH type time series models. Alternatively, one may rely on leading indicator
approach (popularly known as barometric techniques).

The scope of including all determinants in a model is limited. All models are based on assumptions
and one fundamental pre-condition of successful forecast is that the basic data generating process for
the estimation period does not change at the time of forecast. A real economy, however, goes through
continuous changes. Because of a continuous flow of new information, one must analyse them to
judge whether the data generating process has changed fundamentally or not. This type of
assessment, however, will depend on qualitative analysis.

In the absence of a clear deductive theory, in a country study one is often constrained to rely on a lot
of qualitative analysis. Many data collected in a country study, especially on political domain, reflect
opinions of economic agents in a binary or in a Lichter scale. In some cases, detailed interviews are
also made available (e.g., justification of voting records on an issue). In a qualitative analysis, one
attempts to form the big picture by reading and then analysing all these details.

With the arrival of text and visual analytics, even qualitative analysis of the past can be quantified. For
example, one may examine the use of specific word or word combinations in specific websites or social
media feeds to assess the probability of specific events happening.

One possible way-out would be a combination of expert opinion. Delphi technique is a popular tool
that can combine expert opinion very effectively. As per this technique, a few experts would initially
arrive with their own forecasts of a variable. These forecasts may be based on their own econometric
model. One pre-condition in this technique is that no expert would initially know the forecasts of
others. These forecasts would be written on a piece of paper and these numbers will be shown to all.
The experts are then given an option to revise their forecasts and the entire process is repeated.
Generally, after one or two rounds of iterations, one may observe a consensus forecast emerging.
Nowadays all rigorous processes of forecasts go through a few iterations of econometric modelling
and information analysis.

A typical tool of dissemination of forecast is the fan chart. In a fan chart, not only the future trajectory
of a variable is presented, but also the risk associated with the forecast. This risk is then divided into
nine bands carrying different shades of the same colour. The central band has the deepest shade and
as one moves away from the centre in either direction, the colour fades. As risk in a forecast increase
with the forecast horizon, the trajectory looks like an extended fan. Such fan charts can be prepared
for all major macroeconomic variables in principle, although for practical purpose fan charts of GDP
growth rates and inflations rates are the more popular ones. Figure 3 presents a sample fan chart.

As today’s age is an information age, a lot of forecast and expert opinions are available in the public
domain. Organizations like IMF and World Bank regularly carry out country studies and disseminate
their economic outlook for different parts of the world. Credit worthiness of a country in the global
market place is routinely assessed by professional rating agencies. Such forecasts are also carried out
within a country by national governments, central banks and industry associations.

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In an extreme case, the bargaining process may lead to political crisis.

Extreme form: civil war

Source: Fan chart (time series) - Wikipedia

Figure 3: A Hypothetical Fan Chart for Inflation

Third: independent surveys on topics, monitoring surveys and carefully analysing trends.
Elite Study

Elite study involves studying the backgrounds of top politicians, business leaders and other
influencers. Such studies often summarize the work ethics and the value system of the elites in a
country. These studies attempt to examine parental and educational backgrounds of elites.

Political risk in a country is often related to a circulation of elites. For example, if it is seen that many
current elites in a country rose to the top from a relatively humble economic or social background,
then it could be argued that the system of governance in the country allows all having talent a decent
chance.

In many countries, there are elite schools and elite higher institutions. For example, Harrow, Eton,
Westminster and St Paul’s are famous private schools in the United Kingdom. Similarly, Oxford,
Cambridge and London Universities are its famous institutions of higher learnings. A disproportionate
number of British prime ministers came from that background. The French has their Ecole Generale
and Ecole Politechnique are elite institutions in France. Similarly, Ivy League Universities comprising
of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Yale are the elite
universities in the US. Circulation of elite would depend on the nature of the admission process in
these elite institutions. A completely free and fair equal access indicates smooth circulation of elites.
Legacy admissions, in contrast, indicates perpetuation of elite families.

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5 Examples of Some Templates of Country Studies
Among major international institutions, IMF carries out Article IV consultations with all its member
countries every year. As the name suggests, the process, other than data analysis, is hugely
consultative in nature. IMF involves, government officials, officials of central banks and other
influencers in this process.

The focus of IMF country study is on economic stability.

 IMF studies: Major focus

 Report by Governments / Central Banks

References
Ahuja Asvin, Murtaza Syed and Kevin Wiseman, 2017: ‘Assessing Country Risk – Select Approaches –
Reference Note’, Strategy, Policy, and Review Department, International Monetary Fund.

Boulos Alfred J., 2003: ‘Assessing Political Risk’, Independent Petroleum association of America.

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