Marketing a Country: Promotion as a Tool for Marketing a Country

It has been ten years since the first occasional paper by the Foreign Investment Advisory Service, Marketing a Country, was published. In that time Marketing a CountrY has become a standard text on the structure and functions of agzncies that promote foreign direct investment. I have seen copies of the paper in ministries and promotion agencies all over the -world. Usually pages are dog-eared, and the text is heavily underlined, indicating intense study of the contents. Marketing a Country created a languagTe for discussing the investment promotion function, and has provided a rationale for successful promotion, especially in developing countries, that has stood the test of time. This edition benefits from an update in an Afterword by one of the original authors, Professor Louis T. Wells, Herbert Johnson Professor of International Business at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Over the last ten years, Professor Wells has had the opportunity to observe investment promotion in a number of different settings, and uses this experience to review the validity of the main promotion functions identified earlier. He concludes that image building, investor servicing, and investment generation are still important, but that experience also suggests the addition of policy advocacy to the mandate of investment promotion agencies.