Professor Elam

The last post about the information on car sales just got me thinking. And what I am thinking about is information.  There is a lot of it out there, what of it is useful?  Before we go further, read the last blog post about horizontal analysis and car sales around the world.

Suppose you were the head of an organization that had world wide sales capability. With the internet that could be a lot of firms.  What informtion would you want to help you plan your strategy?   Hmm, I feel a good writing topic coming on here!

I can envision a big picture slowly changing database, the sort of thing the CIA does in its factbook.  Then I can imagine breaking it down by say the Index of Economic Freedom.   Take a look at the top ten.  (Notice the drag on the big countries, that’s right, too much government, is any candidate saying that in the Presidential Race, no they are all calling for more of the same.) That would give me an idea of how difficult it would be to organize and set up sales in a country. It might be interesting to do a regression correltion between economic freedom and economic expansion. Then I would like some informationon on, well, information. How many computers and is there freedom of internet access, television, telephones, newspapers, etc are available?  This for example would put Cuba pretty far down my let’s go there list. That would let me know how easy or difficult it will be for me to ‘get the word out’ on my product.

Then we would start amassing detail on the particular industry I think. How often, how frequent, what would the monthly daily, weekly data look like?

Any thoughts?