In an increasingly globalized world, the importance of managing country reputations and international images has risen exponentially in recent years. More than ever, governments must take pains to message diverse sets of key stakeholder groups –often with contradictory interests-- including potential investors and tourists (both foreign and domestic), the global press, bond markets, and international watchdog NGOs, to say nothing of domestic elites and national populations. This course will explore the strategies they use to do so.
A broad array of international examples may be discussed in class within thematic context, or else included in readings, albeit with a particular regional focus on the Latin American region (which is, after all, where we will be traveling.) Despite being a diverse region, rich in resources and human capital, many Latin American countries routinely rank near the bottom of the World Bank’s Annual Ease of Doing Business Index. Understanding the region will require us to challenge many of the contextual assumptions of business education in the United States which has tended to focus on best practice in markets that are relatively free, where corruption is minimal, infrastructure extant, and direct government intervention rare. Given very different national realities prevalent in an emerging markets context, the same challenges that countries must convince potential investors to face. Indeed for Latin American countries, given history proclivities towards drastic political swings from left to right and back, these challenges are of particular salience.
Each session will hone in upon a specific messaging challenge or constituency including tourism development, bondholders and equity markets. The classroom experience will include lectures, case studies and interactive exercises, as well as drawing upon the unique perspectives and applied experiences of world class guest speakers from across the globe.
The travel portion of the course will immerse students into three very different national arenas. Peru is a countrythat has managed, despite numerous setbacks, to reinvent itself globally: from the extreme poverty center of South America (undermined by everything from cholera outbreaks to civil war) to a rising investment powerhouse. Argentina, following much instability and prolonged decline throughout the 20th (and early 21st) centuries is now under new management: actively seeking to overcome its reputation for political extremism and legacy of serial defaults to recapture growth through investment, in hopes of regaining its lost position of regional leadership. Finally, Uruguay is a Scandinavian-style welfare state, an island of stability in a bad neighborhood: lacking mineral wealth or much regional influence it has nonetheless become South America’s leader in per capita GDP and human development.