COUNTRY REPUTATION

An article in The Economist (March 29, 2008) addresses America's image crisis. The author suggests some ways the U.S. can improve its reputation:

• Play a more active role in combating global warming
• Deal with the mess over Guantanamo Bay
• Extend Mr. Bush's attempt to deal with AIDS in Africa

The Wall Street Journal reports on the corporate scandals in Germany. "The drumbeat of negative headlines in Germany echoes those in the U.S. earlier this decade...But while the U.S. scandals were largely driven by accounting abuses amid a stock-market bubble, the spate of German scandals is tied in large part to the mounting pressures of globalization. Those forces have heightened wage inequities in Germany, feeding worker resentment. They have also boosted transparency, revealing underhanded dealings that undermine public trust."

According to polling and research firm TNS Emnid, "In the U.S., it's more individuals who are questioned. In Germany, the system is questioned." Five years ago, polls showed that business leaders enjoyed roughly twice the level of public trust as politicians. Now business leaders are at the bottom rung, with just 15 percent of those polled saying business leaders are trustworthy. (March 4, 2008)

Leading a large multinational company might be a complex and challenging task, but global business leaders believe that heads of state have a much tougher job than they do when it comes to managing reputation. When asked which is harder to manage — a country’s or a company’s reputation — executives chose country reputation more than twice as often (68 vs. 29 percent respectively) according to global public relations firm Weber Shandwick. The survey, Safeguarding Reputation™, was conducted in 11 worldwide markets in partnership with KRC Research. Read more about the study's results here.

As part of Hill & Knowlton's 8th Annual Corporate Reputation Study, 527 MBA students at the top 12 international business schools were asked what region, based on the area's reputation, would they most like to work in. The reputation of key emerging markets, such as Russia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa, discourage students from finding jobs there. By region, MBAs continue to favor job opportunities in Western Europe and North America. The results are as follows:

Edelman's public relations, business is regaining the public’s trust across the world. The findings suggest that corporate governance reforms and the rising wealth of individuals in many developing nations are helping the corporate sector to improve its credibility.

However, trust in government doesn’t fare as well – business was more trusted than governments in every continent. In the US, business received the highest ranking since the survey began in 2001 and government was at its lowest. Government also scored poorly in the UK, France and Germany.

Despite business’ overall recovery, there remains a deep mistrust of CEOs. Less than one in five British, French and German respondents trust CEOs’ statements on their companies – an all-time low. In the US, 22% trust corporate leaders.

The international business school Insead reports that the US is by far the world’s most innovative nation. Insead created The Global Innovation Index, a measure of how readily a country or region responds to the challenge of innovations.

Insead researchers use public and private data from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion Survey and the International Telecommunications Union. They studied the degree to which individual nations and regions respond to the challenge of innovation.

Transparency International (TI) produces an annual corruption index that ranks the honesty level of governments around the globe. While in general the rankings demonstrate what might be considered common wisdom - the richer and more developed the country, the more immune to corruption - the Economist , in their November 11, 2006 issue, questions exactly how trustworthy these assessments are. While there is a pride issue (the United States ranks at about the same level of Chile), a more troubling consequence of the rankings is the possibility that donors could withhold aid to a country upon noting a low rating. Another criticism of the TI study is based the methodology and represents a tension between those who evaluate corruption by looking at bureaucracy and those who look at more subjective factors. For those who favor the latter approach, there is much to be desired for TI's methods: the sample of respondents is not always the same from year to year, with some who came to live in a given country and others are native born. The Economist also points out that corruption takes on many different faces that are not necessarily reflected in the TI rankings. In an attempt to standardize this type of analysis, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has established set categories to study the fairness of governments, though this analysis is now just focused on poorer countries.

The World Economic Forum measures gender gap based on economic, political, educational and health-based criteria. The individual country rankings show Sweden, Norway and Finland at the top. The Philippines is the only Asian country in the top 10. The US falls short of the top 20 and the UK is in ninth place. Sweden is the only country where men and women form equal numbers among all ministers and parliamentarians. Although no country offers women equal treatment with men, countries have made susbstantial progress in education and healthcare according to the research. The analysis is based on a study of 115 countries.