Part II Thinking about complex questions

Before you can answer questions thoroughly, you should develop the skill of reading questions and thinking about them thoroughly. To think about global business, you should probably get yourself primed to think about what it means to manage business transactions across the wide-expanse of the planet Earth. Here are some questions that I hope spark your thinking in this regard.

Please read the following questions and contemplate ways that you would answer them. You are not required to give a formal answer to them, just to read and contemplate them.

Does interest accrue across the international dateline?

What countries lie on the equator?

• Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, Kiribati, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil all lie along the equator, and though the landmasses of Maldives and Kiribati do not touch the equator itself, the equator passes through water controlled by these two territories.

How do the following geographic boundaries affect business transactions (or how do they create business and managerial challenges? Equator, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Arctic Circle, and the Antarctic Circle?

• Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are the places in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres respectively where the suns rays can reach land directly overhead at noon. Note that most large cities and civilizations are based at or around these lines.

Now answer a couple of related questions: 1. What is the most difficult time difference you would have to deal with if you had to do regular communication (ie, conference calls) with a business partner (given that you are in Albuquerque, NM)? Please name a city where that difficult time difference would be located. Please do not use first-person narrative. 2. The World Bank provides important information about the world economy, categorized by nationality. Information in the world economy is measured in many different ways. Example: sometimes we measure the strength of an economy using Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is used as a measure of annual economic productivity. Did you know that since the year 2000, The Russian Federation has had annual GDP growth of 10%? Can you find another way that the World Bank measures social or economic activity? Now choose a metric from the World Bank Database (click here) and explain what that metric intends to measure (do NOT use GDP). Like the example I gave you above, please use the World Bank Database to share with me an information piece (did you know...) Use the same format as the example above. 3. In class, we focused a lot on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Council on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) share information about the amount of money spent on FDI in a given country (see here). Choose a country from the list of FDI places. Now do a little research (basic information and news sites) and help me understand why FDI is increasing or decreasing in that particular country. Example: According to the World Bank the nation of El Salvador totaled nearly 487 Million USD in Foreign Direct Investment in 2016. This is up significantly from around - 113 million in 2010 (meaning it spent more on FDI than other spent on it - negative outflow of investment) and nearly half of 2007 (1.5 Billion). According to the Economist, this is largely due to increased involvement in the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic- Central American Free Trade Agreement) and its increased integration with C4 countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua). Now it is your turn. Try to explain the information in a similar format as the example above