Complementary approaches to preliminary foreign market opportunity assessment: country clustering and country ranking

Companies seeking to expand abroad are faced with the complex task of screening and evaluating foreign markets. How can managers define, characterize, and express foreign market opportunity? What makes a good market, an attractive industry environment? National markets differ in terms of market attractiveness, due to variations in the economic and commercial environment, growth rates, political stability, consumption capacity, receptiveness to foreign products, and other factors. This research proposes and illustrates the use of two complementary approaches to preliminary foreign market assessment and selection: country clustering and country ranking. These two methods, in combination, can be extremely useful to managerial decision makers in the early stages of foreign market selection.     

Gradual Retirement: Preferences and Limitations

In the traditional retirement scenario, individuals work full-time or part-time until a given age, and then stop working abruptly. From the individual’s point of view, it seems more attractive to have a smooth transition, with gradual retirement. In Sweden and other European countries, specific gradual retirement programs have been created in the past 20 years, first in combination with early retirement programs and later to increase labour market participation of older workers. This paper surveys the existing literature on gradual retirement in the US and Europe and analyzes the relevance of gradual retirement in the Netherlands as a tool to keep people employed longer.