investment promotion agency performance review...

Investment Promotion AgencyPerformance Review 2006

IPA PerformAnce

revIew SerIeS

multilateral Investment

Guarantee Agency

ocToBer 2006

Providing Information to Investors

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The Investment Promotion Agency Performance Review 2006: Providing Information to Investors was conducted by the

multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (mIGA) of the world Bank Group. mIGA was established in 1988 to

promote the flow of private foreign direct investment to developing member countries. In pursuit of this objective,

mIGA offers technical assistance programs to develop and implement effective strategies for attracting and retaining

foreign direct investment. This hands-on technical assistance focuses on three primary areas: dissemination of infor-

mation on investment opportunities and business operating conditions in developing member countries through

online services; capacity building of the organizations and institutions involved in the promotion of foreign investment;

and investment facilitation activities supporting the efforts of developing countries to identify and attract investment.

mIGA also offers political risk insurance coverage to eligible investors for qualified investments in developing member

countries. mIGA insures against risks associated with transfer restriction, expropriation, war and civil disturbance, and

breach of contract.

DTZ consulting and research is an international firm that advises multinational companies, major financial insti-

tutions and property companies in the identification of suitable locations for overseas investments. DTZ assisted

mIGA in developing the methodology for this study, and conducted the fieldwork and analysis of the results.

copyright © 2006

The world Bank Group/mIGA

1818 H Street, nw

washington, Dc 20433

All rights reserved

manufactured in the United States of America

first printing october 2006

Available online at:

www.ipanet.net/IPA_review06

www.fdi.net/IPA_review06

for more information, contact:

mIGA operations

1818 H Street, nw

washington, Dc 20433

t. 202.458.9505 f. 202.522.2650

The material in this publication is copyrighted.

requests for permission to reproduce portions

of it should be sent to mIGA operations at the

address above.

Investment Promotion Agency

Performance Review 2006

Providing Information to Investors

A Report of Global IPA Performance Results

October 2006

Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency

World Bank Group

Acknowledgements

MIGA and its team of researchers gratefully acknowledge the contribution of all the IPAs who agreed to participate in the 2006 review, which would not have been possible without their willingness to place their operations under scrutiny. A special note of appreciation is extended to the 11 best-practice IPAs, whose participation enabled MIGA to develop strong benchmarks for others to work toward in the areas of inquiry handling and providing online investor information. Several colleagues at the World Bank Group provided the MIGA team with valuable insights during this report’s peer review process. MIGA is especially grateful to Alan Gelb (DECVP), Beata Javorcik (DECRG), Russell Muir (CICAP) and Uma Subramanian (CICFA) for their comments concerning the 2006 review and future efforts.

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, site selection, or other professional advice or services, and shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person, company, or organization that relies on this publication as a substitute for professional advice or services. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult with a qualified professional advisor.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ........................................................................................1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 7 Participating IPAs: Best-Practice Benchmarks and Developing-Economy Participants .................................................................................................... 9

Establishing a Best-Practice Benchmark ...............................................................9 Selecting 114 IPAs from Developing Economies.....................................................9 Investment Promotion and Information Provision in Context.......................11 The Investor’s Search for a Location and the Role of Information during

Long-Listing .............................................................................................11 MIGA’s Approach to Best-Practice Information Provision .......................................14

Methodology ................................................................................................. 21

Stage One: Selecting and Securing Participation of the IPAs.................................21Stage Two: Developing the Web Site Assessment Methodology and Conducting the

Assessments.............................................................................................21Stage Three: Developing the Inquiry-Handling Assessment Methodology and

Conducting the Assessments .......................................................................24 Stage Four: Calculating Results........................................................................27

Results.......................................................................................................... 29

Summary ......................................................................................................29 Detailed Results of the Web Site Assessment .....................................................34Detailed Results of the Inquiry-Handling Assessment ..........................................40 Conclusions................................................................................................... 51

Overall Results and Regional Performances.........................................................51 Web Site Assessment .....................................................................................52Inquiry-Handling Assessment ...........................................................................52 Key Conclusions and Their Implications for IPAs .................................................53 Looking Forward ............................................................................................55

Appendices ...................................................................................................57 1. Acronyms Used in This Report .......................................................................58 2. Participating IPAs by Region .........................................................................59 3. Factor Weights for Results Analysis................................................................63 4. Inquiry-Handling Exercise Project Descriptions ................................................65 5. Tables of Results.........................................................................................70

IPA PERFORMANCE REVIEW 2006 i

List of Figures and Tables

FIGURES Figure 1: The investor’s process for selecting a FDI project location..........................2 Figure 2: Average scores earned by developing-economy IPAs, by region .................4 Figure 3: The investor’s process for selecting an FDI project location......................12 Figure 4: Dimensions of the investor inquiry-handling system ...............................17 Figure 5: Frequency distribution of combined scores for both assessments ..............30 Figure 6: Frequency distribution of Web site assessment scores.............................31 Figure 7: Frequency distribution of inquiry-handling scores ...................................31 Figure 8: Average scores earned by developing-economy IPAs, by region ...............33 Figure 9: Variance in inquiry-handling scores within and between regions ...............34 Figure 10: Web site assessment results, by dimension of quality............................35 Figure 11: Web site assessment results, by region and dimension of quality ............37 Figure 12: Variance in Web site assessment scores between top five IPAs and

weakest region, by dimension of quality .......................................................38 Figure 13: Web site performance of top five IPAs compared to

developing-economy IPAs, by theme ...........................................................39 Figure 14: Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by region ....................................40 Figure 15: Average scores and variance in inquiry-handling performance,

by region .................................................................................................42 Figure 16: Inquiry-handling assessment results, by dimension of quality.................43 Figure 17: Performance on first inquiry-handling exercise, by dimension of quality ...44 Figure 18: Performance on second inquiry-handling exercise, by dimension of

quality .....................................................................................................45 Figure 19: Inquiry-handling assessment results, by region and dimension of quality .46 Figure 20: Regional inquiry-handling performance against the

developing-economy IPA average ................................................................47 Figure 21: Inquiry-handling performance of top five IPAs compared to

developing-economy IPAs, by theme............................................................48 TABLES Table 1: Best-practice IPA participants.................................................................9 Table 2: Developing-economy participants by region ...........................................10 Table 3: Typical key location factors for three types of investment .........................13 Table 4: Variance of overall performance scores within regions..............................32 Table 5: Web site performance, by dimension of quality ......................................35 Table 6: Inquiry-handling performance, by dimension of quality ............................43 Appendix 5: Tables of Results Table 5-1: Developing-economy IPA scores, averaged by region and compared

with top five IPAs .....................................................................................70 Table 5-2: Variance between highest and lowest scores, by region and compared

with top five IPAs ......................................................................................71 Table 5-3: Web site assessment scores, by region and dimension of quality ............71 Table 5-4: Web site assessment scores, by theme ...............................................72 Table 5-5: Web site assessment scores, by theme and region................................73 Table 5-6: Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by region ...................................74

ii IPA PERFORMANCE REVIEW 2006

Table 5-7: Combined inquiry-handling scores and average variance between performances for two exercises ...................................................................74

Table 5-8: Inquiry-handling scores for two exercises, by dimension of quality..........75 Table 5-9: Combined inquiry-handling scores, by region and dimension of quality ....75 Table 5-10: Regional inquiry-handling performance against the

developing-economy IPA average ................................................................76 Table 5-11: Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by theme ..................................77 Table 5-12: Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by theme and region...................78

IPA PERFORMANCE REVIEW 2006 iii

Executive Summary

CONTEXT

As the global market for foreign direct investment (FDI) has grown, multinational corporations have become more circumspect in analyzing competing locations before making overseas investments. Investment promotion agencies (IPAs) that do not target investments and fail to follow up on potential investor interest could easily fall behind in the race for FDI.

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) of the World Bank Group assists IPAs in developing economies in improving their capacity to attract and retain foreign investors. In 2005, MIGA conducted a pilot study, the Investment Promotion Agency Performance Review, which created a provisional framework for assessing operational aspects of IPA customer service. Building on that pilot, this year’s review focuses on the provision of online investor information and examines how IPAs respond to inquiries from potential foreign investors.

The 2006 study is based on strong industry evidence suggesting that IPAs that provide good quality investor information can influence mobile investors’ location choice decisions, which is commonly accepted wisdom within the investment promotion industry. This study did not set out to test this premise.

MIGA plans to conduct a rolling program of IPA performance reviews. This year’s review measures information provision and investor relationship management at the stage in investors’ decision-making process known as the “long-listing” stage. During this stage, investors whittle down a long list of theoretically suitable locations to a much shorter list of real possibilities for more detailed research. The review does not cover earlier stages relating to awareness raising or later stages generally referred to as ”short-listing” and site selection. (See Figure 1.)

MIGA selected DTZ Consulting and Research to assist with the study, based primarily on the firm’s expertise in conducting site selection searches for corporate clients. The MIGA team and the consultants jointly developed the study’s methodology. The consultants conducted the actual assessments of the participating IPAs, beginning their fieldwork in late 2005 and completing in April 2006. Some 114 developing-economy IPAs were assessed and benchmarked against a selection of some of the world’s best performing IPAs. The consultants’ analysis of the study’s findings provided the basis for the conclusions outlined in this report.

IPA PERFORMANCE REVIEW 2006 1

Figure 1. The investor’s process for selecting a FDI project location

Stage 2

Market entry & establishment

Site selection (generally up to 3

locations with various sites)

Long listing (generally 8-20 locations)

Define project

Short listing (generally up to 5) Stage 3

Stage 4

Stage 1

Stage 5

Identify location drivers & key location factors

Compare assessment of locations to identify strongest fit with key location factors (generally a mix of cost and quality factors)

More detailed assessments, which may include cost modeling and clear assessment of strengths, weaknesses, and tradeoffs

Market visits, site visits, and financial modeling

Regulatory compliance, site acquisition, building,and recruitment

Activities

This year’s IPA Performance Review focused on the information provided to investors during Stage 2 of the site selection process, in which investors compile a “long list” of potential locations to research in further detail.

METHODOLOGY

Using evidence from earlier studies and MIGA’s experience in working with IPAs, the research team developed an evaluation methodology to allow assessments of each IPA’s Web site and of its inquiry-handling capabilities. DTZ played a key role in proposing, challenging and testing the methodology against the firm’s own experiences in the site selection industry prior to its implementation. The resulting methodology assessed the functionality and content of IPA Web sites and inquiry responses from the perspective of international inward investors evaluating key location factors important to their decision-making. The ability of each IPA to manage and respond to specific inquiries was evaluated in two confidential trials in which the consultants used an anonymous inquirer in a “mystery shopper” approach to simulate the information-gathering process of investors.

Together, the Web site assessment and the two inquiries included a total of 174 questions that generated a raw score of 520 points. For this report, the survey results were converted to an index base for ease of comparison. The scores for each component are presented separately and also combined for an overall score.

RESULTS

Overall findings and regional performances

The top five developed-economy IPAs—as measured by the same methodology—achieved a combined overall average score of 89.8 percent, some 45.7 percentage points ahead of the developing-economy average of 44.1 percent. (See Figure 2.)

2 IPA PERFORMANCE REVIEW 2006

The results are presented in terms of the regional groupings used by the World Bank. In addition, the countries that have recently joined the European Union are presented as a separate group. (The sample included Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia.) The EU accession countries recorded a relatively solid performance for both the Web site (72.6 percent) and inquiry-handling (68.6 percent) assessments. Their performance provides a good illustration of countries capable of progressing within MIGA’s target pool for technical assistance programs.

In overall combined scores, Europe (accession countries), Europe (others), and Latin America and the Caribbean performed better than other developing regions—70.6, 49.9, and 52.3 percent, respectively. Although Sub-Saharan Africa earned a relatively low average score (42.2 percent), five of the 10 best-performing IPAs (excluding the EU accession countries) were from the region.

Web site assessment

IPAs in the developing economies performed better on the Web site assessment than in inquiry handling, indicating that many IPAs have made initial investments in communication technologies but have not yet developed the organizational systems and skills needed to successfully interact with and support inward investors.

On the Web site assessment, IPAs in the developing economies earned an average score of 51 percent, whereas the top five IPAs scored 91.6 percent. With the exception of new EU member countries (which recorded an average of 72.6 percent), the other regions recorded averages between 47 and 54 percent.

The main weaknesses of the Web sites for IPAs in the developing economies tended to be content (where they scored 38.1 percent) and promotional effectiveness (47.3 percent). Their scores for Web site architecture (58.6 percent) and design (79.1 percent) were better. Many Web sites did not give investors quick access to core information needed to evaluate the locations’ suitability. The provided information tended to be shallow and often out of date. Importantly, the vast majority of developing-economy IPAs did not make a case for investing in their locations.

Most Web sites provided superficial details about the economy, but with little finesse in the selection of information and in the delivery of key marketing messages. Unlike the top five sites, most developing-economy sites failed to present detailed information about target industries and business activities. Whereas the top five IPAs were adept at combining information in a way that demonstrated the locations’ attractiveness, most developing-economy IPAs neglected to provide reasons why their locations are good investment destinations.


Figure 2. Average scores earned by developing-economy IPAs, by region

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Top fiveIPAs

Europe andCentral Asia

(EU)

LatinAmerica andCaribbean


(other)

Sub-SaharanAfrica

East Asiaand Pacif ic

Middle Eastand North

Africa

South Asia

Scor

e (p

erce

nt)

Web assessment Inquiry handling

When indexed, the overall scores for the IPAs in developing economies (shown on a regional basis here) averaged nearly 50 percent less than those for the top five IPAs.

Inquiry-handling assessment

For inquiry handling, developing-economy IPAs earned an average score of 37.3 percent, compared with a score of 88.1 percent for the top five. Regionally, a considerable range of performances was recorded, with the new EU members (68.6 percent) and Latin America and the Caribbean (50.4 percent) recording the highest average scores, and Middle East and North Africa (24.7 percent) and South Asia (22.0 percent) recording the lowest.

The main areas of weakness among the IPAs in developing economies were customer care (9.8 percent) and quality of response (27.9 percent). Most scored better on responsiveness and handling (40.6 percent) and availability and contactability (61.1 percent).

The survey findings suggest problems at the IPAs ranging from basic failures in their primary means of interfacing with investors to more significant organizational failures and general capability issues. In some cases, it was difficult to contact the IPA because contact details on the Web site were incorrect or e-mails went unanswered. The consultants also encountered process-related and other organizational issues: in some cases, poorly trained frontline staff were unable to forward calls to appropriate project managers; in other cases, disinterested or hostile project managers told the consultants to find information themselves or said they were “too busy” to help. In many instances, a project manager stated a willingness to help but then failed to provide a response or provided a response long after the deadline had passed (a month after, in one case).

The quality of information provided generally resulted in poor scores. A fundamental assumption of this study was that in investment promotion, as in other service-oriented disciplines, it is reasonable for investors as potential clients to expect a well-organized response that provides detailed answers to their questions. However, the survey responses often included no more than a few lines of e-mail text or a


presentation consisting solely of basic and widely available statistics. There was an almost universal lack of overarching arguments showing why the locations would be suitable for the proposed investment. In addition, very few IPAs followed up after providing information in order to find out how the investment project was progressing.

CONCLUSIONS

The study revealed that a significant number of developing-economy IPAs (at least 50 percent of the survey sample) are not yet providing the levels of service and expertise that investors typically expect. As a result, many developing-economy IPAs are receiving less attention from investors than they could receive if they performed better. However, the results also show that a number of developing-economy IPAs are operating at levels close to those of the world’s best. Eight IPAs earned an overall score of 70 percent or higher, indicating that high performance in this area is an attainable and realistic objective for IPAs in the developing world.

Overall, the substance of the information provided suggests that many IPAs do not really understand the industries in which they are seeking to attract investment and do not know enough about their economies’ capabilities to be able to add much to the investment decision-making process. The survey also revealed a fundamental lack of marketing sophistication. Successful IPAs are able to demonstrate how the assets of their locations translate into advantages for specific investors. These linkages were not apparent in most of the reviewed Web sites or inquiry responses.

Although some developing-economy agencies and particular project managers acquitted themselves very well in the inquiry-handling exercises, most of the surveyed IPAs struggled to provide a professional service in their responses. Many did not seem to employ an integrated system with defined roles and tasks for receiving, handling and responding to investor inquiries.

IPAs performed more strongly in the Web site assessment than in the two inquiry-handling exercises. This indicates that the IPAs have made initial investments in communication technologies, but have not yet developed the organizational systems and skills they need to successfully interact with and support inward investors.

IMPLICATIONS

The review underscores a significant area of opportunity for IPAs to improve their competitiveness as service operations. Given that the investor’s short list of site candidates is usually derived by narrowing a long list of potential locations, the service IPAs provide during the long-listing stage is essential to attracting investment. IPAs cannot focus on becoming short-list candidates, and eventual winners in location searches, without first meeting prospective investors’ initial information requirements. IPAs that do not provide this information will have difficulty contributing substantively to investors’ location choice decisions, and ultimately, in demonstrating their value to stakeholders. In this regard, the stakes are high for IPAs; making a good first impression on the investor has important “downstream” implications both for the opportunity presented in each individual investment project, and for the overall long-term success of the agency charged with attracting and retaining investment.

The findings suggest that improvement through a dedicated course of action may be warranted among most IPAs. IPAs seeking to attract investment would be advised to revisit their Web sites to determine whether they provide enough information of real value to prospective investors and to audit the capabilities of their frontline staff and project managers. Over time, the proactive IPA should aspire to develop customized


research services for investors designed to help differentiate its location among global competitors for investment. In this way, the agency becomes a vital player in the process, adding value for investors as they evaluate prospective sites. In responding to investor inquiries, the study illuminates an apparent need among IPAs for capacity building particularly in the “softer” aspects: communications and customer care, internal investor-handling systems, filing and records systems, preparation of responses and report writing.

The 2006 review also has provided impetus for further analysis along several dimensions. MIGA is collaborating with the World Bank’s Development Research Group (DECRG) in a complementary study that is gathering data on the characteristics of IPAs (including MIGA’s entire sample of IPAs). Further research will combine the performance data collected in this study with data on IPA characteristics, and is intended to shed light on the importance of factors such as budget and staff resources, the range of functions undertaken by IPAs, and organizational structure in explaining differential IPA performance.

MIGA is currently developing detailed plans for its 2007 IPA Performance Review, and these will be announced soon. As part of the future program, MIGA intends to repeat the current study to examine changes in performance across the sample of IPAs. Critical lessons learned during the course of the current review—one of the most comprehensive IPA performance studies conducted to date—will be incorporated into the future research program.


Introduction

Growing numbers of companies are seeking new investment opportunities around the world, but the array of locations that offer credible investment propositions is growing as well. As a result, the investment promotion field has become increasingly competitive in recent years. The number of investment promotion agencies (IPAs) touting national and subnational investment sites around the world has grown at least fivefold1 over the past decade, with subnational IPAs proliferating especially quickly, particularly (but not exclusively) in larger countries such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, and South Africa, as well as in the countries of the European Union.

Investors now see political, social, and economic stability, along with a welcoming investment environment, as prerequisites when they consider potential investment locations.2 For that reason, many IPAs, particularly in locations with low stocks of foreign direct investment (FDI) and small investment flows, have found that they need to be more proactive than ever before in pursuing and convincing investors to consider their locations. IPAs that fail in these efforts may have difficulty not only in attracting mobile investment but also, as a consequence, in proving their long-term value to their governments and other stakeholders. On the other hand, IPAs that succeed in winning investments through proactive marketing and services help position their locations for further consideration and investment, especially given that many investors prefer to follow others into developing locations.

One of the most basic challenges that IPAs face is to provide investors with relevant, high-quality information. This is particularly important in developing economies, where the number, range and quality of alternative information sources for investors tend to be limited.

To address this challenge, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency’s (MIGA’s) Investment Promotion Agency Performance Review 2006 focuses on the importance of getting the right information to prospective investors via Web sites and in response to investment inquiries. The review focuses on the ability of IPAs to meet investors’ information needs at the critical ”long-listing” stage of an investment project, when investors whittle down a long list of theoretically suitable locations to a much shorter list of real possibilities for more detailed research. A location must do well at this stage if it is to stay in the race. If a location drops off the list at this stage, it is highly unlikely that it will be able to get back on again later.

The 2006 review is the first in a new program of IPA performance reviews that will enable each participating IPA to benchmark its performance against others in its region and globally. Building on a pilot study carried out in 2004/5, it is designed to help IPAs improve their performance and to provide a framework and baseline for MIGA’s program of IPA assistance. The benchmarking exercise provides MIGA with a

1 The World of Investment Promotion at a Glance: A Survey of Investment Promotion Practices, UNCTAD, United Nations, 2002.

2 A partial exception is natural resource-seeking investment, which responds to different considerations, although even then countries with better investment environments are able to reap greater rewards from investments in their natural resources.


sound baseline that can be used to measure performance improvements over time and to develop diagnostic and assistance packages for IPAs.3

This study is based on strong industry evidence suggesting that IPAs that provide good quality investor information can influence mobile investors’ location choice decisions, which is commonly accepted wisdom within the investment promotion industry. The study did not set out to test this premise.

The 2006 review aimed to evaluate IPA Web sites and to benchmark the ability of agencies to respond to and manage requests for information from potential investors. The objectives were to:

Assess the quality and usefulness, from the investor’s perspective, of information available on IPA Web sites;

Assess the extent to which IPAs are able to handle inquiries from potential investors and their advisors;

Gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of IPAs in the provision of information, so that IPAs will be able to strengthen their efforts.

The fieldwork for the review was carried out between October 2005 and April 2006. The study reviewed performance in 114 IPAs in developing and transitional economies, as well as 11 developed-economy IPAs recognized as being among the world’s best performers. The same methodology was used to evaluate all 125 IPAs.

The review involved assessing each IPA’s Web site and conducting two confidential inward investment inquiries using a “mystery shopper” approach executed by consultants from an actual site selection firm. Results were analyzed and each IPA’s results were compared against relevant benchmarks, such as the average for all developing-economy IPAs. Each IPA has received a report detailing its results relative to benchmarks derived from the analysis, but the individual IPA scores will not be published. (It was decided early on that the prospect of such disclosure would likely dissuade too many IPAs from participating in the study.)

The 2006 review is the first attempt to review and benchmark such an extensive number of IPAs. It is significantly broader than last year’s pilot study in both its sample size and in its methodology requiring a Web site assessment and two inquiries, rather than one, be made of each IPA. This review also is the first time that a study has attempted to assess IPAs’ capability to provide information across multiple marketing channels, namely via Web sites and in response to direct inquiries from prospective investors or their advisors. Because each IPA faced two separate inquiries, it also is the first time that an attempt has been made to benchmark IPAs’ ability to perform consistently when responding to investor inquiries. As such, the findings of the Web site and inquiry-handling assessments provide a unique perspective on the capabilities of IPAs globally.

To help substantiate the methodology and then carry out the study, MIGA selected DTZ Consulting and Research, a firm experienced in site-selection searches and data-gathering exercises on behalf of corporate clients exploring locations in different regions of the world. The study thus combines MIGA’s wide experience in IPA performance with the consultants’ direct experience in meeting investors’ information needs. In developing the methodology, the consultants were able to confirm or adapt the underlying assumptions posed by the MIGA team based on their experience. Selecting a consultancy active in the location search business also added the credibility of using an actual firm’s name when making inquiries of the IPAs.

3 MIGA also conducts benchmarking studies under its ongoing Enterprise Benchmarking Program (EBP) that compare sector-specific operating costs and conditions for investors. These studies have focused on Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, the Western Balkans, China’s Sichuan Province and Africa (near completion), and a study is in the works for the Caribbean/Central America.


Participating IPAs: Best-Practice Benchmarks and Developing-Economy Participants

ESTABLISHING A BEST-PRACTICE BENCHMARK

To provide an aspirational benchmark for the study, 11 IPAs were identified from those considered the world’s leaders in the field. The 11 IPAs were selected partly based on the results of the 2005 pilot study, which examined the inquiry-handling performance of some 70 IPAs from the developed economies, and partly based on other studies and the collective experience of MIGA and the consultants.

The results presented in this report include two key benchmarks: first, the highest score achieved for each question by a participating IPA, and second, the average of the five top-performing IPAs. The latter benchmark, rather than the average of all 11 best-practice IPAs, is intended to provide a tighter comparator—one that may be more useful in setting aspirational standards for the participating IPAs. The 11 best-practice IPAs that participated in the review are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Best-practice IPA participants

National IPAs Subnational IPAs

Czech Invest

EDB Singapore

Invest in Denmark

Invest in Sweden

Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency

Scottish Development International

UK Trade and Investment

Invest Hong Kong

Invest Victoria

The Mersey Partnership

Yorkshire Forward

Broadly, and with very few exceptions, the results for the 11 selected IPAs validated their selection as top practitioners. As noted, however, the top five IPAs were selected to create a clearer average benchmark that is used for comparative purposes in the study’s results.

SELECTING 114 IPAS FROM DEVELOPING ECONOMIES

The sample included 114 IPAs from developing economies in every region of the world, as detailed in Table 2. (A full list of participating IPAs appears as Appendix 2.)


Table 2. Developing-economy participants by region

RegionNumber of IPAs

East Asia and Pacific—EAP

Europe and Central Asia (EU Member States)—ECA (EU)

Europe and Central Asia (Other)—ECA (Other)

Latin America and Caribbean—LAC

Middle East and North Africa—MENA

South Asia—SA

Sub-Saharan Africa—SSA

29

5

13

15

14

5

33

TOTAL 114

Note: Regions based on World Bank regional classifications.


Investment Promotion and Information Provision in Context

FDI is having a significant effect on how developing economies integrate into the global economy. Whether considering investments as a means to gain access to resources, reduce costs, or enjoy growth in new markets, international corporate investors increasingly are implementing their strategies on a global scale.

To create employment opportunities and accelerate economic growth in their economies, many governments have elected to pursue strategies to attract foreign investors. An important part of attracting investors is providing information about the economy and other features of the location that make it suitable for direct investment.

Providing information to investors, therefore, is a key component of the mission of an IPA. It is particularly important in developing economies, in which the reliable, detailed, and up-to-date information that a prospective investor needs to make a sound assessment of possible locations may be hard or impossible to obtain from sources other than the IPA. Companies can sometimes find the information they require through various public and private sources, but its accuracy and timeliness is often questionable. By providing reliable and relevant information, the IPA can minimize inaccuracies and present the location’s advantages in the best possible manner.

THE INVESTOR’S SEARCH FOR A LOCATION AND THE ROLE OF INFORMATION DURING LONG-LISTING

IPAs create and disseminate information at all stages of the marketing and promotional pipeline. They raise awareness through branding strategies, participate in events, run advertisements, and help companies grow once established in the market. This review focuses on the role of the IPA in a very specific stage in the investment-location process—namely the long-listing stage.

When investors make decisions they generally filter a long list of locations (sometimes as many as 20) to arrive at a much shorter list (usually no more than five), after which they undertake a more detailed or technical assessment leading to market visits and site selection. (See Figure 3.)

Before selecting a location or site, a prospective investor will define its strategic objectives and identify the factors on which its location decision will be based. The company will develop a list of “key location factors” (KLFs), a set of criteria that will be used to compare and evaluate various location options.4

4 KLFs vary from company to company, from sector to sector, and according to the business activity proposed. However, while variations may be wide, commonalities, too, are considerable. KLFs tend to include a mix of cost and qualitative criteria. The MIGA/consultant team’s understanding of KLFs drove the approach to assessing Web site content and influenced the mystery shopper inquiries that were posed to IPAs. The study’s assumptions, outlined in subsequent sections of this report, were based on empirical research where possible and elsewhere on actual market experience. See, for example, three reports by DTZ Consulting and


Figure 3. The investor’s process for selecting a FDI project location

Stage 2

Market entry & establishment

Site selection (generally up to 3

locations with various sites)

Long listing (generally 8-20 locations)

Define project

Short listing (generally up to 5) Stage 3

Stage 4

Stage 1

Stage 5

Identify location drivers & key location factors

Compare assessment of locations to identify strongest fit with key location factors (generally a mix of cost and quality factors)

More detailed assessments, which may include cost modeling and clear assessment of strengths, weaknesses, and tradeoffs

Market visits, site visits, and financial modeling

Regulatory compliance, site acquisition, building,and recruitment

Activities

This year’s IPA Performance Review focused on the information provided to investors during Stage 2 of the site selection process, in which investors compile a “long list” of potential locations to research in further detail.

At the long-listing stage of an investment project, high-level comparisons of locations are made in order to exclude sub-optimal locations and identify those locations with the strongest potential. At this stage, investors or their advisors will conduct research in-house using various databases and the Internet, which means the information provided through IPA Web sites is critical. This stage usually is carried out remotely; site visits generally are not performed at this stage. Often, information available online will be supplemented by direct inquiries from the investor or its agent. Such inquiries typically are made to the most important investment body in the location, usually the IPA.

At the short-listing stage, an investor will refine the set of location criteria and introduce a greater level of detail into the assessment. It is at the short-listing stage that a company will often undertake financial and cost modeling. Companies are more likely to interact directly with an IPA at this stage. Locations may be visited.

Although companies vary in the weight they assign to individual factors, they will tend to consider numerous factors at the long-listing stage, depending on the project type. (See Table 3.)

Research: (1) Factors influencing the location of traded services, 2006; (2) One in Seven: The Economic Impact of Inward Investment on the Economy in London, Think London, 2005; (3) Working for Business, Central London Partnership, 2005.


Table 3. Typical key location factors for three types of investment

Manufacturing Office-based servicesResearch &

development

Economic and political stability

Regulations on treatment of foreign-owned firms (and profits)

Market size

Market growth

Presence of suppliers

Presence of competitors

Utilities supply (power, ICT, water)

Property availability

Transport infrastructure

Labor force skills and availability

Labor costs

Utility costs

Transport costs

Property costs

Scientific or intellectual infrastructure and intellectual property rights (for advanced manufacturing)

Import and export conditions, trade treaties (where relevant)

Business support




Market size

Market growth

Presence of competitors

Utilities supply (power, ICT)


Air connectivity

Labor costs

Property costs

Utility costs

Business support




Scientific or intellectual infrastructure and intellectual property rights

Market size

Market growth

Utilities supply (power, ICT, water)


Air connectivity

Labor costs

Property costs

Utility costs

Business support

IPA Web sites and responses to inquiries must contain information relating to the most common location factors. Most best-practice IPAs have an in-depth understanding of KLFs and how investors will evaluate their locations against them. Best-practice IPAs also tend to understand KLFs at sectoral and subsectoral levels and are aware of the KLFs applied by companies in various businesses.

For example, best-practice IPAs (including those surveyed in this review) typically include details on their Web sites and in their inquiry responses that reflect an understanding of what factors are most important in various sectors and subsectors and for specific types of projects. They not only can respond to a food project or financial services project, but also can respond in a differentiated way to a snack-food R&D project or a back-office project for a retail bank.


The methodology of the review reflects corporate interest in KLF-related information. MIGA’s Web site assessment criteria and inquiry-handling survey are designed to determine and quantify the extent to which an IPA has developed an understanding of the nature of the information sought by investors, as well as the IPA’s ability to meet investors’ expectations.

MIGA’S APPROACH TO BEST-PRACTICE INFORMATION PROVISION

The information provided to investors affects their investment decisions. An investor may include a potential location on its long list on the basis of information that has surfaced about that location. But even if the location would indeed be suitable for a particular investment, it may not stay on the list if additional information about it is not readily available. The extent to which an IPA provides high-quality information is reflected in its promotional Web site, as well as through the information provided directly to investors.

The approach to best-practice Web site provision

MIGA has been a pioneer in using Web sites to promote investment, having developed the first FDI portal Web site, IPAnet,5 which disseminates to investors information about developing and transitional economies. Since IPAnet‘s establishment in 1995, MIGA has provided technical assistance to help IPAs set up their own Web sites, and to generate and present investor-oriented content on those sites.

MIGA’s approach to best-practice Web site development and maintenance is derived from a variety of studies in usability analysis.6 Although these studies have not focused on investment promotion, MIGA has adapted those assessment areas that can be applied across all business sectors to the investment promotion context. For nearly a decade MIGA has conducted Web site assessments for its client IPAs, and development of the Web site assessment methodology used in this review has led to the addition of a scoring component. This allows Web sites to be evaluated according to a standard set of criteria, thus minimizing subjectivity.

To arrive at a clearer understanding of what types of information are sought by investors and their advisors during Web searches, MIGA referred to investor surveys conducted by units of the World Bank Group, including MIGA, as well as research by sources outside the World Bank.7 MIGA has also profited from the experience of its consultants in their work with investment relocations.

5 IPAnet, also known as the Investment Promotion Network, was established 1995 as an online forum for developing countries to disseminate investment-related information to the global investor community (http://www.ipanet.net). Now averaging 60,000 users a month, IPAnet serves as the technology backbone of MIGA’s efforts to assist IPAs in their Internet interface with investors.

6 Including three seminal papers as follows: (1) A framework for FDI promotion by Henry Loewendahl, Transnational Corporations, Vol. 10, No. 1, April 2001; (2) Assessing a firm’s web presence: A heuristic evaluation procedure for the measurement of usability by Agarwal and Venkatesh, Information Systems Research, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 2002; and (3) Consumer-Centric Emarketing Value Assessment Model: An Adaptation of Heuristic Evaluation Usability Testing, The Seven C’s Framework and The Value Bubble To Assess Website Marketing Objectives Achievement by O’Keefe and Askim-Lovseth, Journal of E-Business, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 2005.

7 Including several sources as follows: Foreign Direct Investment Survey, MIGA, 2002; Results from a Survey of International Investors in the Power Sector—What International Investors Look for When Investing in Developing Countries, World Bank Energy and Mining Sector Board Discussion Paper No. 6, May 2003; Administrative Barriers to Investment in Africa, FIAS, 2000;


http://www.ipanet.net/

MIGA’s operational experience shows clearly that the collection and presentation of good quality investor information is a particularly hard task for many IPAs, particularly in terms of the extent of availability and transparency of information generally in their locations. The IPAs’ task is more difficult in countries where good information is scarce, and this situation potentially impacts both the Web site and the inquiry- handling assessments. Nevertheless, in the interests of producing comparable results across the global sample of IPAs, the research team decided not to try to flex the methodology to reflect this kind of factor. Thus, it is understood that some IPAs may, in principle, have been treated with somewhat more rigor than their circumstances would warrant in order to yield a fuller spectrum of data.

MIGA’s research and experiences helped to create a detailed picture of the characteristics of best-practice Web sites, which provided the foundation for the survey methodology. That picture is summarized in Box 1.

Box 1. Characteristics of best-practice Web sites

Information architecture Quick downloads. Acceptable Web site download times are getting shorter, as users have faster connections. Investors or their agents will not wait for slow downloads before moving on to the next Web site. Guaranteed uptime. Web site owners (IPAs) can and should demand 100 percent uptime from their Internet service providers. Worldwide accessibility. IPAs should test their sites on different Internet browsers and different platforms. They should invite users to contact them if they have trouble viewing pages. Hierarchical organization of information. Information should be grouped according to key location factors or business interests, such as economic overview, priority sectors, operating costs and infrastructure availability. Finding home. Navigational bars on each Web page should allow users to click back to familiar territory. For example: home, about us, contact us, or site map. Design Ease of reading. Text should be written in common international business languages and presented in a format that can be scanned and is appropriate for the Web. Investors have much information to assimilate, so texts should be short. Color. Colors should be used to enhance the legibility of the text but should not be overpowering. Contrasting colors pose competing demands on users, so neutral colors are usually safer in Web site design. Graphics. Well-designed and carefully positioned graphic elements are inviting, but graphics should be small to speed downloads. Navigational aids. Buttons and links should be well-designed and intuitive. Warn users of large file sizes and nonstandard formats (for example, when linking to the full text of investment laws or annual reports).

Administrative Barriers to Investment in Real Estate in the Perm Region, Russian Federation, FIAS, 2003; Solving the FDI Mystery, fDi Magazine, June 2002.


Box 1. Characteristics of best-practice Web sites (continued)

Content Investor focus. Ensure that information meets the needs of investors. The site should be client-focused and reflect knowledge of the end user’s needs. Investors are interested primarily in business conditions and the operating environment in the location. Information about the organization or government should be confined to services offered to investors. Summaries. Summarize the reasons why the location is suitable for investment. Comparisons. Provide comparative data relating to key location factors to help companies evaluate locations. Statistics. Marshal current statistics to support claims. Cite only reputable sources. News. Sections devoted to news and events should be current and of specific interest to business investors. Avoid news geared to general users or tourists. Testimonials and case studies. If a major global company has invested, this will be of interest to other investors, as it demonstrates that it is possible to conduct business there. Downloadable fact sheets. Key information should be consolidated in convenient downloads, saving effort for the investor and reinforcing the IPA’s role as information gatekeeper and promoter of the location. Sector-specific information. Sections on specific priority sectors, industries, or business functions should accentuate market availability for potential investors. Information should be sufficient to inform the investor of the key capabilities and priority industries of the economy, with case studies or testimonials provided for individual sectors. Contact information. List IPA contacts prominently. Name individuals with specific expertise and provide contact details for teams who work on particular sectors. Promotional effectiveness Finding the site. The IPA Web site must be easy to locate on major search engines (Google, Yahoo). It should be meta-tagged with these search engines and well linked to other sites so that the IPA’s site has prominent positions in search results. Anticipating investors’ needs. Information should be tailored to investors’ needs. The location should be presented to show that it fulfills the investor’s requirements. Government affiliation. Clearly identify the IPA’s relationship with the government and its ministerial affiliation. Beyond that, minimize references to the government and to bureaucratic aspects of the IPA’s responsibilities.

The approach to best-practice inquiry handling

MIGA’s inquiry-handling assessment and benchmarking methodology uses a set of elements selected from among best practices to assess and compare the performance of IPAs. Thus, it implicitly conveys recommendations to help IPAs handle investor inquiries. Some are based on common business practices or are widely known and


accepted best practice in other disciplines, whereas others are based on specialized research and MIGA’s accumulated experience in working with IPAs.

The value of the methodology is that it provides a best-practice model of how a set of related elements can be brought together to improve IPAs’ capability to handle inquiries effectively. This review has the added value of alerting participating IPAs to those parts of their operations that do not meet high enough standards.

To improve their performance in handling investors’ inquiries, IPAs should address the proposed benchmarking elements, not as discrete items but rather as parts of a system. Performing well on one or more related elements is important, of course. But excellent performance in one or two areas is no substitute for good comprehensive performance.

IPAs should focus first on understanding the major dimensions of any effective system for handling inquiries from investors. Once the system is understood, the IPA can emphasize specific elements to improve the system. The four broad dimensions of an investor inquiry-handling system are: availability and “contactability,” responsiveness and handling, response quality, and ongoing customer care and monitoring. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4. Dimensions of the investor inquiry-handling system

Response

Customer care and ongoing

support

Continuous improvement

Monitoring & evaluation

Investor inquiry

Availability & contact-ability

Investor inquiry


Readiness

Response

Customer care and ongoing

support

Continuous improvement

Monitoring & evaluation

Investor inquiry


Investor inquiry

Availability &

Readiness

contactability

Best-practice IPAs address the four key dimensions of inquiry-handling—availability and contactability, responsiveness and handling, response quality, and ongoing customer care—in an integrated system that is continuously monitored for improvement.


By taking into account these four dimensions and integrating them into a system for handling investors’ inquiries, IPAs can be sure to cover the elements that are most likely to meet the investor’s needs.

It is important to understand that the creation of an effective system is much more complex than simply putting these four dimensions together. An effective system will involve at least two other distinctive elements:

• First, the system must include elements that allow the organization to monitor and evaluate inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. The monitoring and evaluation components must become an integral part of the system if the IPA is to be able to monitor its effectiveness and take remedial or developmental action when opportunities arise to correct a problem or make an improvement.

• Second, and building on the first, the system needs to be able to undertake what is known as continuous improvement. By integrating monitoring and evaluation into the system, the system becomes a self-evolving/self-improving mechanism to achieve increasingly better results.

The main characteristics of best-practice inquiry handling, based on the research team’s interpretation of the available evidence, are presented in Box 2.

Box 2. Characteristics of best-practice inquiry handling

Availability and contactability

Companies look first for contacts on the IPA’s Web site. Best-practice IPAs have accurate contact details for officers or for certain types of inquiries (e.g., by sector).

IPAs need to be easily contactable. Most investors begin their inquiries via telephone or e-mail. IPAs must be able to respond to telephone inquiries.

Best-practice IPAs ensure that when an investor calls during business hours the telephone is answered promptly. If for some reason the call cannot be picked up, the caller should be asked to leave a message. Messages should be returned at the earliest opportunity—certainly within one business day.

Good IPAs conform to the norms of good business practice when answering the telephone. They answer by providing the speaker’s name and the IPA’s name, and by asking how the IPA can help the caller.

Good IPAs also conform to good e-mail etiquette. They acknowledge receipt either by e-mail or by phone and provide an indication of when the investor may expect a fuller response. Best-practice IPAs tend to call the investor to find out more about the project, so that their responses can be specifically tailored to the investor’s needs.

If the appropriate project officer cannot take the call, the staff member who does take it should ask some basic questions to try to ascertain the nature of the inquiry. In this way, the call can then be forwarded in the most appropriate manner. If the project officer is unavailable, a message should be taken. The message should include the caller’s name, the nature of the inquiry, and a good time for the project officer to call back (as provided by the caller). A best-practice IPA never asks the caller to call back later.

If the IPA chooses to use a generic e-mail address for all investment inquiries or sector-specific e-mail addresses, its staff must check the inbox regularly so that inquiries can be followed up by appropriate staff within no more than two business days.


Box 2. Characteristics of best-practice inquiry handling (continued)

Because best-practice IPAs provide accurate contact details, often for a specific knowledgeable project officer, this officer is usually able to manage the inquiry in its entirety. It is not good practice to forward the investor to multiple contacts within an agency or, even worse, to other agencies or departments in the government.

Responding within the investor’s specified time frame is highly desirable (the earlier the better), as the company will have internal deadlines.

Responsiveness and handling

Best-practice IPAs have carried out extensive research into their industries and international trends so that they are prepared to respond intelligently to investors’ inquiries and add value by pointing out additional relevant information that the investor may not yet have considered.

Best-practice IPAs have put in place sound internal systems, processes, and training to ensure that when an investor makes contact, all IPA staff members have a clear understanding of their own roles in the inquiry-handling process.

Best-practice IPAs seek to learn as much as possible about the investment project and the investor’s business and have enough experience to engage with investors in an informative and professional manner.

The quality of response

It is good practice to answer all the investor’s questions and to organize the response in such a way that the investor can readily locate the answers to questions posed. For this reason, it is best to provide the response in a single document or presentation and to include a table of contents.

Best-practice IPAs tend to include a summary, either at the beginning or the end of their responses, which highlights exactly why the location is the best one for the investment. Investors often use this summary in their own internal reports; by providing it, the IPA saves the investor time but also ensures that the right arguments are made for its location.

It is always desirable to include hard facts from reliable sources and current com-parative data. Investors also appreciate case studies of other investors or testimonials from well-known companies, as this quickly establishes that the location is viable.

Best-practice IPAs understand the key investment issues in any given sector and are able to anticipate and respond to questions that an investor may not have yet asked. Being able to provide additional, relevant information helps demonstrate an IPA’s awareness and understanding of the company’s business environment and needs. Additional information that is not relevant is not desirable.

Responses should also include a summary of the services and support that may be available to the investor. Best-practice IPAs use this as an opportunity to demonstrate to the investor that interaction with the IPA is desirable, ensuring ongoing involvement in the project.

Customer care and monitoring

Good IPAs always e-mail or call to confirm the investor received the information. Best-practice IPAs offer to meet or arrange a visit for the investor (budget permitting).

Best-practice IPAs also try to contact the investor within two weeks of responding to the inquiry to ascertain if the IPA can do anything else to support the project. Such follow-up helps ensure the IPA’s continued involvement in the project.

If the investor chooses to locate the project elsewhere, best-practice IPAs try to learn why. Typically, the project manager contacts the investor to ask for feedback so that appropriate action can be taken in the future.


Methodology

The review measures IPA performance in providing investor-relevant information by:

Assessing the layout, navigation, and content of IPA Web sites from an investor’s perspective; and,

Examining IPA performance in dealing with investor inquiries.

The methodology of the review is driven by the investor’s perspective. In other words, it challenges the IPA’s Web site and inquiry-handling capabilities just as investors and their agents would do when gathering information for a long list of potential locations. The achievements of individual IPAs are benchmarked against the highest scores actually achieved by an IPA in the sample, rather than against a theoretical ideal that cannot be empirically tested.

Web sites were assessed on the extent to which information of interest and relevance to investors was conveyed, based on MIGA’s and the consultants’ knowledge of how investors evaluate locations. Similarly, inquiry handling and the quality of information transferred through the inquiry-handling process were evaluated from the same perspective.

STAGE ONE: SELECTING AND SECURING PARTICIPATION OF THE IPAS

The best-practice IPAs were selected from a list of those known to be among the world’s top IPAs, including the best performers from the pilot study. The developing-economy IPAs were selected from three main groups: most were benchmarked in the pilot study, and other MIGA clients and subnational agencies were added to the pool, reflecting particularly the growth in subnational IPAs as a development theme. MIGA wrote to the IPAs to explain the study and confirm their willingness to participate. Those that did not want to participate were asked to “opt out.” Of the initial group selected to participate, only two developing-economy IPAs declined. Thus, the study’s sample was virtually the same in size and character as the pool initially selected to participate, which was widely representative of the overall population of IPAs in terms of regional breadth and performance based on the results of the pilot study.

STAGE TWO: DEVELOPING THE WEB SITE ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY AND CONDUCTING THE ASSESSMENTS

MIGA’s Web site assessment methodology is based on the approach that the agency has developed over a decade of helping clients to plan, design, and implement their investment promotion Web sites.


The Web site analysis was designed to assess the IPA’s ability to:

Promote its location to business investors and advisors in a clear, accessible manner

Provide information of use at the long-listing stage of an investor’s location selection process.

The Web site survey script and scoring methodology were designed to measure the extent to which an IPA had developed and maintained a Web site that:

Is readily identifiable and accessible by investors and their advisors

Effectively uses the medium and is readable and visually appropriate for the medium

Is constructed and maintained in a way that makes it easy for site users to find the information they need

Provides information of interest to and useful for an investor or advisor.

The assessment evaluated each IPA’s Web site on four key dimensions: information architecture, design, content, and promotional effectiveness. These dimensions of high-performance Web sites are grounded firmly in the supporting literature and validated by the accumulated experience of MIGA and the consultants.

Information architecture refers to the layout and organization of information in a Web site and the extent to which the site has a consistent and logical structure that allows users to quickly identify key pieces of information.

There are various models of information architecture, but the aim of each is the organization of information to satisfy the information needs of any user, whether he is browsing the site for interesting facts or searching for a specific resource to assist in decision-making.

Because companies are often pressed for time, it is important that Web sites present information in a way that allows Web users to readily identify topics of interest and find information of specific relevance. The use of headers, sidebars, and other conventional Web site layout techniques is highly recommended, as it allows for the logical categorization of information and ease of navigation through the Web site.

The information architecture dimension covers three key themes:

• Web-friendly structure. Does the home page set up well on standard PC screens, or is extensive scrolling required to view information?

• Ease of navigation. Does the site use navigation bars and prompts? Is it easy to move from page to page?

• Web site functionality. Does the site provide signposts to key topics? Is it downloadable in an industry-standard time? Do graphics and links function as they should?

Design refers to the general appearance and readability of a site. The “look-and-feel” of the Web site is immediately noticed by users. Although users have different preferences for color and shape, a few characteristics that have implications for the overall usability of the site should be given careful consideration. Because appraisals of design can be highly subjective, the assessment focused on quantifiable aspects. These include readability and the consistent application of design templates across the site. The design dimension covers two key themes:

• Look and feel. Does the page have visual appeal? The assessment did not call for subjective evaluations of such traits as attractiveness. Rather, the assessment measured whether the look of the site was consistent across pages and whether it reinforced the branding of the IPA.


• Reading ease. Do the site’s choices of color and text support readability? Are font sizes consistent? Are headings short and Web friendly?

Content pertains to the relevance, accuracy, currency, and accessibility of the site’s information to potential investors. MIGA has paid very close attention to this dimension in technical assistance programs and assessments conducted for clients, and has focused much effort on developing guidelines for creating investment-oriented Web content.

As stated in the previous section, investors tend to search for particular types of information and data that they will use when comparing investment destinations. Consequently, the methodology reflects the information needs of prospective investors, and the assessment evaluated the Web sites according to the extent to which they contain content that is relevant, accurate and easily accessible to potential investors. The content dimension covers seven key themes:

• Clarity of purpose. Does the Web site portray the location as a destination for foreign investment? Does it introduce the IPA’s services for investors on the home page?

• Core information. Does the site contain key information for foreign businesses that is both relevant and useful?

• Sector information. Does the site provide sector-related information? Is that information consistent in depth and quality across multiple sectors?

• Credibility of information. Does the site use statistics to support claims? Are the source and date of the statistics provided? Are the sources credible?

• Currency of information. Is the information on the site up to date? Does the site include information on business events and investor-related news?

• Use of downloads. Can visitors download investor reports and presentations from the site? How comprehensive is this information for inward investors?

• International accessibility. Is the site translated into English and other business languages in common use in the IPA’s target markets? Are the versions accurate and consistent in the level of information provided in each language?

Promotional effectiveness measures the extent to which the Web site is effective in its primary aim of selling the location and the IPA’s services to prospective investors. The IPA Web site is designed not only to promote its location in a passive sense, but also to persuade investors to locate in the region and engage with the IPA.

Promotional effectiveness is reflected in elements such as branding, a clear focus on investors (as opposed to other users, such as students and tourists), business-oriented messages, marshaling of arguments for why the location is an ideal investment destination, and technical elements, such as the prominence of the site on major international Web search engines.

The assessment evaluated the extent to which each IPA’s Web site was effective in its primary aim of selling the location and the IPA’s services to inward investors. The promotional effectiveness dimension covers five key themes:

• Branding. Does the home page include corporate branding images or statements?

• Corporate roles and messages. Does the Web site clearly set out the role of the organization and the services it provides? Does it offer clear guidance on how to obtain further information and advice?

• Contact information. Does the site clearly present a range of contact options for site visitors?

• Promotional effectiveness. Is the Web site selling the location to investors?

• Web prominence. Is it easy to find the site when searching the Internet?


After assigning weights to each of these key dimensions and themes, the consultants designed a questionnaire that allowed an assessment of the Web sites against each point. Once individual questions were developed and a scoring system was devised for each question (with some questions being binary and others by necessity using a scale), weights were attributed to each individual question based on MIGA’s and the consultants’ experiences with respect to the relative importance of each category in the location decision process. These weights are detailed in Appendix 3.

To minimize subjectivity, all elements for assessment were rigorously defined. Written scoring guidelines were provided to the consultants acting as reviewers. To maximize clarity, binary questions were used wherever possible. Consequently, some elements had to be measured by using multiple and very specific questions, rather than via more general or high-level questions of a more qualitative nature.

Before commencing the assessments, guidance notes were developed for the assessment teams to ensure consistency across evaluations. Each reviewer was allocated a selection of sites with a geographical spread, so that no single person reviewed all the sites in any region. As a final measure, random reviews of completed surveys were undertaken to check for consistency.

If a Web site was unavailable, the reviewer repeatedly tried accessing it at various times of day and over a period of days. The scoring reflects accessibility.

STAGE THREE: DEVELOPING THE INQUIRY-HANDLING ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY AND CONDUCTING THE ASSESSMENTS

The consultants devised survey scripts and scoring methodologies to measure the extent to which an IPA had put in place systems to handle investor inquiries, had conducted the background research to enable IPA staff to develop appropriate content, and had cultivated the requisite level of professionalism to enable the staff to interact with investors and their advisors.

The surveys were designed to assess the IPA’s ability to respond to requests for information in a professional and appropriate manner—and to do so in a way that would be likely to increase the investor’s motivation to engage further with the IPA and ultimately invest in the location.

The framework for assessing inquiry handling defines the desirable attributes of good practice under four main characteristics or themes: availability and contactability, responsiveness and handling, response, and customer care.

Availability and contactability measure the ease with which an investor can locate the IPA and identify individuals to contact in its search for information. An IPA’s visibility on the Web is important for most companies, particularly new investors and small- to medium-sized enterprises that tend not to use consultants when undertaking investment projects. Companies and their advisors tend to use the Web to uncover initial, basic information about a region. If the IPA’s Web site is prominently listed on major search engines, an investor is more likely to contact the IPA.

By providing detailed contact information (by key sectors or staff expertise), an IPA can raise the chances that a prospective investor will recognize that it has valuable skills in its field and thus will be more inclined to contact the IPA. Detailed contact information also increases the likelihood that the investor will contact the appropriate project officer, thus saving time for both parties and creating a better first impression of the IPA.

The assessment evaluated the extent to which the IPA offered prominent and useful contact details in response to common Web searches that an investor would use. The dimension of availability and contactability covers two key themes:


• Web availability and contactability. Does the IPA have a Web site? Is it easy to find on basic Internet searches?

• Quality of contact details. Were the contact details available to a potential investor from the Web site clearly set out, easy to identify, and accurate?

Responsiveness and handling refers to the ease with which an investor can communicate with the IPA and the IPA’s ability to engage with the investor in a professional and informed manner. Investors, particularly those from developed economies, expect that their telephone calls (if made during the business day in the target location) will be answered promptly and professionally and that they will be put through immediately to an appropriate officer. Similarly, they expect that their e-mails will be answered within no more than two business days. These protocols mirror their expectations for their own companies; they expect other organizations to behave in a like manner.

Best-practice IPAs know key industries and business functions. They are adept at posing pertinent questions about a caller’s business and proposed investment. That knowledge and those skills enable the IPA to put together a strong response to an investor’s inquiry, demonstrating to the investor that the IPA values the investor’s business. That demonstration instills confidence in the IPA and, by extension, in the location’s economy—and helps ensure that the investor will continue its contact with the IPA.

Under the dimension of responsiveness and handling, the assessment evaluated the IPA’s call and e-mail handling, as well as its professionalism in interacting with investors in the early stages of an inquiry. The responsiveness and handling dimension covers four key themes:

• E-mail and phone responsiveness. Does the IPA have a good triage system for classifying and routing investor inquiries from the Web site? Is it effective at handling clients who contact the organization directly?

• E-mail handling. How well does the IPA respond to initial e-mail inquiries to the Web site? Is e-mail correspondence well linked to clients’ initial inquiries? Does that correspondence project a clear and professional image of the agency?

• Call handling. Are the IPA’s first-level communication channels and project officers competent and thorough in their handling of clients’ telephone inquiries?

• Competence and responsiveness in handling inquiries. Are the IPA’s project officers aware of the client’s original inquiry and able to provide a timely response? Do they manage the inquiry in a coordinated way and complete their work by the deadline?

Response refers to the IPA’s actual response to investment inquiries. The assessment of response focused on several factors. First, the consultants acting as reviewers assessed the document’s style, including how well it was formatted, branded, and organized. Second, they reviewed the document’s overall quality and credibility, including readability, responsiveness to specific questions, and presentation of a good business case for the location. The operating assumptions were that investors expect clear and comprehensive answers to their questions about the location and its suitability for the proposed investment, and that any supporting data or statistics will be honest and credible. However, because IPAs are promotional agencies, their communications should present information in a way that shows their economies in the best possible light. Third, they looked at whether the IPA used the inquiry as an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the investor’s business and sought additional opportunities for engaging with the investor, for example, through visits or meetings. Best-practice IPAs typically view the investment inquiry and the response as the first stage in an ongoing process leading to investment. The response should reflect this.


Although best practice would suggest that each response should be tailored to the inquiry that provoked it, the response typically draws on materials and research previously created by the IPA in anticipation of investment inquiries. As such, responses reflect whether the IPA has developed systems to support inquiry processing and prepared core information ahead of time. Best-practice IPAs have a cupboard of pre-prepared information that they modify and re-purpose when crafting individual responses to investors. The response dimension covers eight key themes:

• Timeliness of interim response. Did the IPA provide an interim response to the inquiry within two days? (The assessment verified that the IPA’s communication was in response to the survey’s inquiry.) Providing an interim response, while not mandatory, can often help to create a better working relationship with the client.

• Quality of interim response. Was the information provided in the interim response clear and useful?

• Format of full response. Was the IPA’s full response presented clearly as a single document prepared using appropriate business software?

• Branding in full response. Was the response well branded? Did it project consistency and a strong image?

• Organization of full response. Did the response include a cover letter, contents page, introduction, and relevant headings relating to the project?

• Answer coverage in full response. Did the IPA address each of the investor’s issues in turn and customize its response to the investor’s particular needs, thereby providing information of real value in the long-listing process?

• Credibility of full response. Did the response make good use of comparative data and relevant and well-referenced case studies and testimonials? Did it use good grammar and spelling?

• Business case in full response. Did the IPA explain why its location was suitable for the proposed project?

Customer care refers to the actions that an IPA takes after responding to an investor’s request to ensure that the investor received and was satisfied with the information and support provided. The ability of an organization to ensure customer satisfaction is critical. The assessment measured whether the IPA had the right systems and staff orientation to deliver good service to investors.

The assessment also measured whether the IPA performed quality controls such as confirming receipt of information, ensuring that the investor had all the necessary information, and following up with the investor after an appropriate period to see whether additional services were needed. This last aspect is important, as many IPAs fail to check on how a project progresses once information is provided and consequently miss an additional opportunity to sell the location. Finally, the assessment measured whether the IPA offered to meet with the investor or host a visit.

• Customer care follow-up. Did the IPA take action to follow up on the information it sent to the client? Did it offer more help or take other steps to advance the project? Did it inquire about the suitability of the information sent to the client, offer further information, or seek to arrange a meeting? Did the IPA follow up on the status of the project?

Using an approach similar to the one used for the Web site assessment, the consultants compiled a questionnaire that enabled an assessment of each IPA against the key dimensions and themes related to inquiry handling. A scoring system was designed for each question. Weights were allocated for each question based on MIGA’s and the consultants’ experiences with respect to the relative importance of each category in the location decision process. These weights are detailed in Appendix 3.


As with the Web site assessments, criteria for assessment were rigorously defined. Clear scoring guidelines were provided to the consultants acting as response reviewers. Binary questions were used wherever possible.

As stated earlier, it was decided that each IPA would be given the chance to respond to two inquiries, both of which used the mystery shopper approach. Two inquiries provided a more representative picture of each IPA’s capability and enabled the assessment to track whether IPA performance was consistent. Inconsistent performance is undesirable, because it points to weakness in content development, organization, staff selection and training, and delivery systems.

To ensure consistency across projects, the consultants posed the same number of questions in each of the two inquiries. The questions were broadly similar.

The first inquiry was common to all IPAs (and related to a project that the IPAs were believed to be able to accommodate) to better enable the creation of a common baseline. For the second inquiry, IPAs were allocated one of a number of projects depending on their known economic strengths or sector foci.

It was critical that the proposed projects be both believable and of sufficient scale to motivate the IPAs to respond to the best of their abilities. The underlying assumption was that IPAs have resource constraints and may prefer to work directly with investors rather than via intermediaries. Thus, the inquiries were modeled on real projects in which the consultants had assisted corporate clients, modified as appropriate to minimize the risk that particular companies could be identified. Project descriptions and key questions posed to the IPAs appear in Appendix 4.

Because each IPA was tested twice, the timing of the inquiries was carefully phased so that no IPA would be handling both inquiries simultaneously. Consideration was also given to holiday periods in the respective countries.

Throughout the inquiry-handling assessment, every effort was made to ensure that performance was measured in accordance with the perspective of the prospective inward investor, and specifically, those key location factors important to the investor’s location decision for a particular industry and type of project.

For both inquiries, the IPA was approached using information listed on its Web site in an attempt to follow the likely contact path of a potential inward investor. In all cases, the consultants behaved as a company would behave if it had had no previous experience with the IPA. It was assumed that a company would initially seek contact information via a Web search. If the Web site named individuals or provided contacts by sector, those contacts were used. Otherwise, generic contact information was used.

STAGE FOUR: CALCULATING RESULTS

Before the results were calculated, cross checks of the assessments ensured that the assigned scores were not influenced by subjective considerations unique to the individual reviewers. In some cases, individual questions were reassessed in order to maintain a standard of consistent scoring.

As explained in the previous sections, the consultants devised unique approaches for the two components of the study. To yield an overall organizational perspective, the results of the Web site review and inquiry-handling exercises were averaged to produce a single IPA performance score. The results were calculated as follows:

• The scores for each question in both the Web site and inquiry-handling assessments were weighted to reflect the question’s relative importance in the context of its quality theme, based on MIGA’s and the consultants’ knowledge of investors’ considerations in conducting location searches.


• Next, those results were indexed against the highest score achieved for each question by a participating IPA, in order to generate a benchmark of achievable, relative performance.

• The results of the two inquiries were averaged to yield a combined inquiry-handling score. To provide a measure of consistency of performance, the difference between the two inquiry-handling results was noted.

• The indexed result of the Web site assessment and the combined inquiry-handling score were averaged. This produced a score for each IPA reflecting its overall performance.

The overall results present the following comparisons: the highest score achieved by any one IPA, the average of the top five highest-scoring IPAs, and the average score of the developed-economy IPAs in each geographical region.

It was decided early on not to report results for individual IPAs, as the research team believed that the prospect of such disclosure would have dissuaded too many IPAs from participating in the study. Each participating IPA has received a report detailing its results, benchmarked against the scores described above, as well as the average score of the developed-economy IPAs. Individual reports include each IPA’s results (for each dimension and theme) in tabular format.


Results

SUMMARY

A total of 125 IPAs were evaluated for the review: 114 developing-economy IPAs and 11 best-practice IPAs. As described in the previous section, each IPA Web site was assessed along four major dimensions of competency involving some 72 questions. A perfect score was 148. In the two inquiry-handling exercises, each IPA was assessed along four key dimensions, with a total of 81 questions and a perfect score of 186. Overall IPA capability was therefore evaluated in 234 questions yielding a maximum score of 520. As the results show, IPA capability ran the length of the spectrum, with some clustering.

Of the 114 developing-economy IPAs, five were not assessed in the Web site review (including three IPAs from Sub-Saharan Africa). Each of these IPAs either had no Web site or its Web site was out of service or under construction. In several other cases, IPA sites were under construction, but sufficient information was provided to allow an assessment to a certain degree. Individual IPA reports highlight which IPAs fell into each category.

The consultants had less success in populating a complete set of benchmark scores for the inquiry-handling assessment. For the first inquiry, e-mail or telephone contact was not made to 11 of the 114 developing-economy IPAs. A further 22 did not submit a response, for a total of 33 without a response. In the second round, it was not possible to obtain either telephone or e-mail interaction with project managers in 25 IPAs; an additional 19 did not submit a response (44 in total). A group of 22 IPAs did not respond in either round. Two IPAs failed to record either a Web site assessment score or a score for either of the inquiry-handling exercises.

Regionally, a distinct pattern is discernible. The majority of non-responding IPAs (about two thirds) were in East Asia and Pacific (12 IPAs in the first inquiry and 15 in the second, with eight IPAs not responding to either inquiry) and Sub-Saharan Africa (10 and 12 IPAs respectively in the two inquiries, with six IPAs not responding to either inquiry). This is particularly striking in the case of East Asia and Pacific, where two thirds of IPAs surveyed in the region did not respond to at least one of the inquiries and more than one quarter did not respond to either inquiry. In Middle East and North Africa, 11 of 14 participating IPAs did not respond to at least one inquiry, as was the case for four of five IPAs in South Asia.8

Given the importance of making a good impression at the long-listing stage of the location search process, the failure of so many IPAs to respond at all to the submitted inquiries is one of the areas of greatest concern posed by the study’s results. Failure to respond would, in practice, almost certainly mean that a location would be dropped from the investor’s list of possibilities and that the investment would be lost.

8 The overall response rate was 66 percent; when both inquiries are considered together, 151 responses were received from a combined total of 228 opportunities to respond. Regional response rates, based on total opportunities to respond, were as follows: ECA (EU) – 100 percent; ECA (Other) – 88 percent; LAC – 87 percent; SSA – 67 percent; EAP – 53 percent; MNA – 46 percent; SA – 40 percent.


Some IPAs performed well in one inquiry-handling exercise but poorly in the other. Similarly, some promised to provide information but did not. These IPAs tended to bring down the average scores for many regions.

On the other hand, most IPAs performed relatively well in the Web site assessment; some 60 percent of the participating IPAs (68 of the total sample) scored 50 percent or higher.

The frequency distribution of scores (as shown in Figures 5–7) supports three main conclusions:

• The distribution of IPA capabilities is wide, ranging from very high to very low.

• There was some clustering of scores, particularly for the Web site assessment, in which about 50 percent of IPAs scored in the range of 40–60 percent. There was significantly less clustering in the inquiry-handling scores.

• The gap between the vast majority of IPAs from developing economies and the best-practice IPAs is quite wide.

Figure 5. Frequency distribution of combined scores for both assessments

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Figure 6. Frequency distribution of Web site assessment scores

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Figure 7. Frequency distribution of inquiry-handling scores

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The results indicate a wide distribution of capabilities among the IPA participants and a wide gap between the scores of the best-practice IPAs and those of the majority of the developing-economy IPAs. For the Web site assessment, about half of the IPAs scored in the range of 40-60 percent.


The top five IPAs achieved an average combined score of 89.8 percent, considerably higher than the average for all developing-economy IPAs of 44.1 percent. (See Figure 8 and Table 5-1 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results).

Table 4 shows the range of overall scores within each region.

Table 4. Variance of overall performance scores within regions

Percent

Top performing

IPA IPA average for region

Lowest performing IPA Region

Europe and Central Asia (EU) 73.2 70.6 68.0

Latin America and Caribbean 71.7 52.3 22.8

Europe and Central Asia (Other) 71.5 49.9 29.5

Sub-Saharan Africa 74.8 42.2 0.3

East Asia and Pacific 72.9 38.8 17.2

Middle East and North Africa 60.2 38.7 20.2

South Asia 44.7 36.7 20.7

Most developing-economy IPAs scored higher on the Web site assessment than for the handling of the investor inquiries. The average score on the Web site assessment was 51 percent, compared to the average of 37.3 percent for the two inquiry-handling exercises. The gap between the average for the top five IPAs and the average for the developing-economy IPAs was 40.6 percentage points for the Web assessment, but 50.8 percentage points for the handling of the investor inquiries.

For the Web site assessment, with the exception of new EU member countries (which recorded an average of 72.6 percent), the average regional scores fell within a fairly narrow range of 47.4–54.2 percent. However, for the inquiry-handling assessment, a considerable range of regional performances was recorded, with the new EU members (68.6 percent) and Latin America and the Caribbean (50.4 percent) recording the highest average scores and Middle East and North Africa (24.7 percent) and South Asia (22.0 percent) recording the lowest.

It is worth noting here that, although the overall average score for the IPAs in Sub-Saharan Africa was very similar to that for developing-economy IPAs as a whole, the average was impacted by the inclusion of a number of subnational IPAs from South Africa that performed on average much better than IPAs generally across the region. If the scores for the subnational South African IPAs are not included, the overall average for the IPAs in Sub-Saharan Africa declines from 42.2 to 37.4 percent, the Web site assessment score from 47.4 to 43.8 percent, and the inquiry-handling score from 37.1 to 31 percent.


Figure 8. Average scores earned by developing-economy IPAs, by region

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Top fiveIPAs


(EU)

LatinAmerica andCaribbean


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Web assessment Inquiry handling

The developing-economy IPAs in all regions scored higher on the Web site assessment than for the handling of the investor inquiries.

That the Web site scores are generally higher than the inquiry-handling scores may indicate that many IPAs have made the initial investment in promotional technologies and systems, but have not yet developed the organizational capability to interact with and support inward investors.

IPAs in countries that recently joined the European Union tended to perform very strongly. In general they, and a number of IPAs in Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, performed very strongly in both the Web site and inquiry-handling assessments. Two reasons explain many of the stronger performances. First, many IPAs in these regions appear to have done research that now allows them to provide detailed information on those sectors, industries, or businesses in which their economies are competitive. Second, in their interactions with investors they were found to be able to manage inquiries professionally and to reply with responses that were (relatively) detailed and that answered the investors’ questions.

The organizational weaknesses exposed in the inquiry-handling exercises suggest that while many IPAs will attract investment inquiries as a result of their relatively strong Web sites, they will struggle to convert inquiries into investments because they lack the ability to respond well to inquiries. However, with a relatively small additional investment in staff training and content development, many IPAs could significantly improve their inquiry-handling performance.

Some regions showed much more variability in inquiry-handling performance than others. (See Figure 9.) Because countries in a given region tend to compete for investment, the fact that most regions possess a number of relatively strong IPAs is encouraging. South Asia, and to a lesser extent, Middle East and North Africa, are exceptions. Over time, the leading IPAs in each region may raise the competence levels of IPAs across their regions.


Figure 9. Variance in inquiry-handling scores within and between regions

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Top f ive IPAs Europe andCentral Asia (EU)

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(other)

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Highest scores Lowest scores Variance between high and low scores Average score for region

Some of the developing-economy regions showed significant variances between the high and low scores within their regions, indicating the existence of strong IPAs with the potential to raise overall competence levels in these regions.

Overall performance between IPAs varied considerably in nearly all regions. The widest gap (74.5 percentage points) was in Sub-Saharan Africa, which included both the best and worst performing developing-economy IPAs. Apart from the top five IPAs and IPAs from the countries that recently joined the European Union, the narrowest gap in IPA performance was in South Asia (24 percentage points), although the relatively lower level of performance by all IPAs in that region undoubtedly helps narrow the gap. (See Table 5-2 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.)

DETAILED RESULTS OF THE WEB SITE ASSESSMENT

The Web site assessment revealed substantial variation in the highest score received by a participating IPA, the average score of the top five IPAs, and the average score of all developing-economy IPAs. (See Figure 10 and Table 5.)


Figure 10. Web site assessment results, by dimension of quality

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Information architecture

DesignContent

Promotional effectiveness

Top five IPAs Highest score achieved All developing-economy IPAs (N=114)

In the Web site assessment, the average overall score of the developing-economy IPAs was 51 percent of the highest score achieved by any participating IPA. Of the four quality dimensions, the developing-economy IPAs scored highest on quality of design. (Refer to Table 5.)

Table 5. Web site performance, by dimension of quality

Percent

Highest score achieved

All developing-economy IPAs

Top five IPAs

Combined score 100.0 91.6 51.0

Information architecture 92.0 93.8 58.6

Design 100.0 97.0 79.1

Content 93.1 80.1 38.1

Promotional effectiveness 100.0 91.4 47.3

The highest score received by a participating IPA and the average score of the top five IPAs held across all dimensions of the Web site assessment. That consistency in performance is important. Unbalanced or uneven performance, or a lack of ability on one or more dimensions, tends to reduce the overall effectiveness and impact of the IPA because investors and their agents rely so heavily on Internet research in their long-listing processes.


The Web sites of developing-economy IPAs earned higher average scores for information architecture (58.6 percent) and design (79.1 percent) than for promotional effectiveness (47.3 percent) and content (38.1 percent). Within the content dimension, developing-economy IPAs scored particularly low on sector information (28.9 percent), downloadability of relevant information (25.7 percent), and currency of information (22.5 percent). (See also Figure 13.)

What explains the higher scores for information architecture and design? One possible explanation lies in how IPAs have invested the significant assistance they have received in recent years for Web site and Internet development. They appear to have focused on technical issues such as design and architecture, rather than on the research and development work that needs to be done to create and present solid information for investors.

Many reviewed IPA Web sites were quite shallow in their content, with limited or inconsistent information on sectors or business functions. Similarly, too many sites provided no data to support their claims. In many cases, these Web sites offered details about the IPA’s functions or bureaucratic processes, rather than information that might help an investor assess the location. Too often, information was not current and sources were not specified. In general, many sites reflected a poor understanding of the sort of information that would be of interest to an investor. Some read as if they were directed at tourists, rather than at serious business investors.

Most of the developing-economy sites failed to promote their locations or to state why their sites were suitable for investment. Very few sites managed to bring together information in a way that would help convince investors to choose their locations. That failure contrasts with the sites of the top five IPAs, which offered business cases at the sectoral and sub-sectoral levels and a large amount of comparative statistical and graphical data that investors can use in evaluating their locations.

That said, most of the developing-economy Web sites were well branded and provided detailed contact information for their agencies.

The gap between best practice and the performance of the IPAs in most regions appears clearly in Figure 11. As noted, the variances in content provision and promotional effectiveness are most striking.

The top five IPAs also experienced lower performance for content than for other dimensions. The highest score achieved by a single participating IPA was 93.1 percent on content, but the top five IPA average was 80.1 percent. Despite their low average score for content provision, 12 developing-economy IPAs scored at least 60 percent on this dimension, including six in Sub-Saharan Africa—three national and three subnational IPAs. Their success demonstrates that it is possible to score well in this area.

Every IPA needs to make the tactical decision of how much content to provide on its Web site. Some IPAs may opt not to post detailed content on their sites, hoping to induce investors to contact them directly for this data. For such a strategy to be effective, however, the site must convince investors that the IPA in fact has the information available. The IPA also must have the systems in place to handle investors’ inquiries. There is little value of setting things up on the Web site simply to drop the ball once the investor gets in touch.

Several developed–economy IPAs that have adopted such an approach to content scored very well across all other dimensions and were able to provide detailed responses in the inquiry-handling exercises, indicating that their overall performance supports their content-rationing strategy.


Figure 11. Web site assessment results, by region and dimension of quality

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Top five IPAs EAP ECA (other) ECA EU LAC MENA SA SSA

Among the four dimensions of the Web site assessment, all seven regions recorded relatively higher scores for information architecture and design.

There was a variance of 44.2 percentage points between the average score of the top five IPAs and the lowest score (combining scores for all four dimensions) recorded by a developing-economy region. Considering dimensions individually, as shown in Figure 12, the variance was 21.6 for design, 41.3 for information architecture, 46.8 for promotional effectiveness, and 46.9 percentage points for content. (See also Table 5-3 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.)


Figure 12. Variance in Web site assessment scores between top five IPAs and weakest region, by dimension of quality

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There was a variance of more than 40 percentage points between the average score of the top five IPAs and the lowest combined score achieved by a developing-economy region for three of the four dimensions covered in the Web site assessment.

The strengths and weaknesses of the Web sites of developing-economy IPAs at the thematic (sub-dimensional) level compared to those of the top five IPAs are illustrated in Figure 13. (See also Table 5-4 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.)


Figure 13. Web site performance of top five IPAs compared to developing-economy IPAs, by theme

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Currency of Information

Dow nloads

Sector Information Provision

Promotional Effectiveness

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Corporate Roles & Messages

International Accessibility

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Score

Top f ive IPAs (av) All developing-economy IPAs (av)

In this figure, the developing-economy IPAs’ average scores for various aspects of the Web site assessment are shown in descending order from their best performance, in branding and the look and feel of the sites, to their worst, in the use of downloads and currency of the information.

The developing economies tended to score relatively well against the sites of the top five IPAs on Web site branding, visual consistency, and elements of functionality, such as download speed, home page organization, and functioning links within and from the site. Similarly, the majority of sites were easy to read, prominent in Web search results, easy to navigate, and employed common international business languages.

On the other hand, the study found the IPAs in developing economies were weak in the currency of information on their sites. Many sites did not give dates for information provided and failed to keep news articles and other information current. Many of the reviewed Web sites for developing-economy IPAs provided no downloads, such as fact sheets, presentations about the location, newsletters and marketing brochures, and few sites profiled sectors or key business activities. On many sites, there was little information about specific sectors or industries. Much of the information provided on the IPA sites was economy-wide and thus did not provide investors with the depth of information they typically require.

These weaknesses and strengths were fairly consistent across the regions. (See Table 5-5 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.)


DETAILED RESULTS OF THE INQUIRY-HANDLING ASSESSMENT

As with the Web site assessment, the IPAs for countries that recently joined the European Union performed relatively well in handling inquiries, as did those from Latin America and the Caribbean. (See Figure 14 and Table 5-6 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results). However, the variation in performance between the top five IPAs and the developing-economy IPAs was more marked for inquiry handling than for Web site quality.

Figure 14. Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by region

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Inquiry 1 Inquiry 2

In inquiry handling, the IPAs for countries that recently joined the European Union performed relatively well, as did those from Latin America and the Caribbean.

On average, the top five IPAs performed better on the second inquiry, whereas the developing-economy IPAs (except those in Europe and Central Asia) performed better on the first. One explanation may be that the first inquiry dealt with a general food-production project, which might not be a priority sector for developed-country IPAs because of the difficulty in competing for such projects on the basis of labor and other costs. The developed-country IPAs constituting the top five may well have been more motivated by the second, more specialized inquiry. The top five IPAs identify priority targets for investment and devote more resources to attracting certain types of investment.

This explanation was substantiated to some extent by the fact that the top five IPAs were less keen to follow up the first inquiry than they were the second, and this was the major difference in scoring between the two inquiries.

Nevertheless, the top five IPAs scored an average of 81.2 percent on the first inquiry compared with an average of 39.1 percent for all developing-economy IPAs, indicating that the top five IPAs tend to have in place inquiry-handling systems that allow them to provide a high-quality response even to inquiries about nonpriority sectors.

For the IPAs of the developing economies, the lower score on the second inquiry could be related to several factors. One possibility is that they found the food-production project of the first inquiry relatively easier to handle, whereas when faced with a more demanding inquiry requiring a deeper level of knowledge about the location’s assets


and capability, they were not prepared and had insufficient knowledge of the sector to respond strongly.

The overall inquiry-handling performance of the IPA was strongly correlated with the extent of variance in performance between inquiries. (See Figure 15 and Table 5-7 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.) The highest score achieved by a participating IPA varied little from one inquiry to the next; it was consistently excellent. In general, the top five IPAs also showed relatively little variance compared with the overall inquiry score, although the average for the top five was affected by a single IPA that had substantial variance between inquiries.

Inconsistent performance probably indicates a lack of organizational capability as expressed in some or all of the following factors:

• A poor or nonexistent inquiry-handling system

• A lack of pre-prepared material that can be easily tailored and provided to investors

• An ability to service certain types of investors or sectors but not others

• Varying levels of skill and training among project managers.

In theory, IPAs should strive to develop organizational systems and skills so that every inquiry receives a consistently high level of customer service.


Figure 15. Average scores and variance in inquiry-handling performance, by region

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The overall performance of the IPAs in inquiry handling was strongly correlated with the extent of variance in performance between the two inquiry-handling exercises.

The highest score achieved by a participating IPA, the average score of the top five IPAs and the average score of the developing-economy IPAs as a group diverged widely in their combined scores for the inquiry-handling exercises. Figure 16 shows a breakdown of these scores by the four major dimensions of quality: availability and contactability, responsiveness and handling, response, and customer care. (See also Table 6.)


Figure 16. Inquiry-handling assessment results, by dimension of quality

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Top five IPAs Highest score achieved All developing-economy IPAs

In inquiry handling, the developing-economy IPAs scored highest for the availability and contactability dimension, although their combined score for both inquiries was 50 percent lower than that of the top five IPAs. (Refer to Table 6.)

Table 6. Inquiry-handling performance, by dimension of quality

Percent

All developing-

economy IPAs

Highest score

achieved Top five

IPAs

Combined inquiry-handling score 93.7 88.1 37.3

Availability and contactability 98.1 78.4 61.1

Responsiveness and handling 93.7 84.1 40.6

Response 78.2 84.5 27.9

Customer care 83.3 74.4 9.8


As in the Web site assessment, the performance of the developing-economy IPAs was uneven; in particular, there was substantial underperformance in the area of customer care. Relationship development is critical to making a good impression on prospective investors and ensuring that the IPA is in the best possible position to influence (or at least inform) their decisions. Yet many IPAs simply did not follow up to determine whether their responses to the inquiries were satisfactory or whether the investor might need additional information or services. Nor did they seek to develop a deeper relationship with the investor. Most did not attempt to contact the investor to find out how the inquiry was progressing or to try to arrange a meeting or visit program. In summary, most developing-economy IPAs simply sent off information and failed to maintain contact with the investor.

The performance gap between the best-practice agencies and those of the developing economies was similar across both inquiry-handling exercises; however, there was some variance between the two inquiries, as can be seen by comparing Figures 17 and 18. (See also Table 5-8 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.)

Figure 17. Performance on first inquiry-handling exercise, by dimension of quality

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As seen by comparing Figures 17 and 18, the scores varied between the first and second inquiry-handling exercises. In both exercises, the developing-economy IPAs substantially underperformed in the customer care dimension, relative to the other dimensions and the top five IPA average.


Figure 18. Performance on second inquiry-handling exercise, by dimension of quality

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In the second inquiry-handling exercise, the top five IPAs scored better than in the first exercise in all four dimensions, while the developing-economy IPAs scored worse in three of the four.

The developing-economy IPAs also were weak in the area of responsiveness and handling. In this respect, the most common failures were not responding promptly to e-mails and not engaging the investor in conversation about the project. Telephone calls to many IPAs were answered by individuals unable to discuss the investment project and sometimes even unable to transfer the call to an appropriate project officer. Likewise, e-mails often were forwarded to several people within the agency or left unanswered. Possibly the most important failing in this area was that many IPAs missed the deadline for response specified by the investor. Several IPAs responded weeks after the deadline.

With respect to the response itself, the weak overall performance of developing-economy IPAs was related to the fact that most IPAs simply provided a short e-mail response consisting of a series of bullet points or a collection of Web links, apparently with the expectation that the investor should finish the search. In comparison, the top five IPAs tended to compile comprehensive reports that answered all the investor’s questions in an organized manner, drawing on statistics, case studies, and testimonials as appropriate. Only a small number of developing-economy IPAs attempted to include with their responses a summary of why the investor should locate in their regions. There was a clear absence of a business case for investment in the responses of most developing-economy IPAs.

The performance of IPAs in all regions showed a downward trend from the simple to the more complex elements of inquiry handling. (See Figure 19 and Table 5-9 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results). The key insights suggested by these findings are that many, if not most, developing-economy IPAs in all regions lack a customer-service focus and have not prepared adequately to respond professionally to investment inquiries.


Figure 19. Inquiry-handling assessment results, by region and dimension of quality

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Availability & contactability Responsiveness & handling Response Customer care

Scor

e (p

erce

nt)

Top five IPAs EAP ECA (other) ECA (EU) LAC MENA SA SSA

The performance of IPAs in all regions showed a downward trend from the simple to the more complex elements of inquiry handling.

There was a gap of some 71.7 percentage points between the average score of the top five IPAs and the lowest overall score earned by a region’s IPAs. Along the individual dimensions, this gap ranged from 31.1 percent for availability and contactability to 82.2 percent for customer care.

As previously noted, the inquiry-handling exercise revealed a substantial lack of capa-bility in many IPAs. The key reasons for poor performance were: many IPAs could not be contacted because the contact information on their Web sites was inaccurate, the IPA did not respond to e-mail inquiries, and they could not be reached by telephone.

• Occasionally, when an IPA did answer the telephone, it was unable to assist. The consultants were passed from person to person without reaching an IPA staff member able to assist.

• Many IPAs that agreed to provide information failed to do so.

• Many IPAs missed deadlines.

• Many IPAs, even when they did provide a response, did not provide answers to the questions asked of them or provided an e-mail response of just a few lines.

• IPAs often made no more than a minimal effort to tailor their responses to the inquiry, relying instead on generic materials, most of which were not specific enough to address the inquiry.

• In many cases, IPAs simply referred survey staff back to their Web sites and refused to answer any questions directly, which was doubly problematic because often the Web sites did not contain the necessary information.

• Some IPAs resisted (strongly in some cases) helping investors with their information gathering and were prepared to assist only if the investor would formally declare its intention to invest, complete a form, or comply with a regulatory requirement.


Examining regional results against the developing-economy average, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia lagged behind the average for the dimensions of responsiveness and handling and response, whereas Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia scored relatively well on these measures. The regions converged more closely around the average for availability/contactability and customer care. (See Figure 20 and Table 5-10 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.)

Figure 20. Regional inquiry-handling performance against the developing-economy IPA average

-30%

-20%

-10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

Availability andcontactability

Responsiveness andhandling

Response Customer care

Varia

tion

from

dev

elop

ing

econ

omy

IPA

aver

age

scor

e

All Developing-economy IPAs (av) SA MENA EAP SSA ECA (other) LAC ECA (EU)

In inquiry handling, the IPAs in the ECA (EU) and LAC regions performed better than the developing-economy IPA average (shown as 0% in the figure) in all four dimensions of quality, although the regions converge more closely around the average for availability/contactability and customer care.

The developing-economy IPAs as a group performed better on some measures of quality than on others. (See Figure 21 and Table 5-11 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.) On average, they were strongest on the themes of Web site availability, response format, and quality of contact details. Their performances were weaker on some of the softer aspects of customer service, such as e-mail handling and project follow-up.


Figure 21. Inquiry-handling performance of top five IPAs compared to developing-economy IPAs, by theme

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Quality of interim response

Follow up

Provision of interim response

E-mail handling

Business case in response

Organization of response

Branding in response

Quality of answ ers in response

Credibility of answ ers in response

E-mail and telephone responsiveness

Call handling

Inquiry handling competence & responsiveness

Quality of contact details

Response format

Web availability

Score

Top five IPAs (av) All developing-economy IPAs (av)

In this figure, the developing-economy IPAs’ average scores for various aspects of the inquiry-handling assessment are shown in descending order from their best performance, in Web availability and response format, to their worst, in follow up and quality of interim response.

Among IPAs in general, the interim response they provide to investors is not always substantive, and the survey weightings reflect this practice. Some IPAs provide an interim response while preparing a full response to specific questions. Others send a brochure or other material designed to keep the investor interested while the response is being prepared. Most of the surveyed best-practice IPAs did not submit an interim response at all, preferring instead to go straight to a more complete response. Providing material in advance of the full response is, in itself, neither positive nor negative, but it appeals to some investors.

However, when an IPA knows that it will struggle to provide the required information or to meet the set deadline, the interim response can play an important role in keeping the investor informed and maintaining contact. Long silences from the IPA are never seen as good news by investors or their agents. A significant number of IPAs in the sample did not submit an interim response, and then failed to provide a full response within the specified period. This is very bad practice, because if the investor is being driven by an internal deadline (such as a board meeting) and the IPA misses


the required deadline without having registered any interest in the project, the location likely will be dropped from the investor’s long list.

Across the regions, there was marked variation in performance. (See Table 5-12 in Appendix 5: Tables of Results.) Overall, developing-economy IPAs struggled with similar aspects of inquiry handling, notably response quality, customer care, and monitoring. In the regional analysis, the wide variance between the scores of the top five IPAs and the developing-economy IPAs is clearly evident, particularly so in some themes. For instance, each of the seven regions scored less than 50 percent of the top five IPAs’ average scores in follow-up to the response and in making a business case in the response. Six of the seven regions scored less than 50 percent of the top five IPAs’ average scores in e-mail handling, organization of response, and quality of answers in the response.


Conclusions

OVERALL RESULTS AND REGIONAL PERFORMANCES

The results of this study are mixed. Overall, there is much in the average performances of the surveyed IPAs that is encouraging for most regions, although all regions still lag behind global best practices.

Except in South Asia, the review found individual examples of overall good practice in all regions. Some surveyed developing-economy IPAs operate at levels comparable to or approaching the world’s best. Eight IPAs from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia earned a combined score of at least 70 percent, and an additional 12 IPAs scored in the range of 60–70 percent. In other words, some 17.5 percent of the overall developing economy sample achieved scores equivalent to about two-thirds or better of the best-practice benchmark.

That achievement signifies that some IPAs have made very good progress, often in difficult circumstances. The existence of local examples of good practice should make it somewhat easier for other IPAs in each region to observe and learn from the better performers. MIGA will seek to capitalize on these examples by developing initiatives to highlight and share good practices on a regional (and even subregional) basis. To facilitate this process, MIGA intends to approach some of the better-performing IPAs with a view to preparing case studies of best practice.

However, the real challenge lies at the other end of the results spectrum. There is a considerable range of performance in all regions, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and Pacific. Just under half of the developing–economy IPAs (including IPAs from all regions) achieved an overall combined score of 40 percent or less. Some 15 of the participating IPAs scored 25 percent or lower.

Perhaps of greater concern is that 55 IPAs (48 percent of the sample) failed to respond to at least one of the two inquiries, while 22 (19 percent) failed to respond to both. In a real-life site search, such a failure would almost certainly take the country out of the running. Five of the surveyed IPAs either did not have a Web site or could not make a Web site available during the assessment period.

This study sets out the range of strong and weak performances being achieved by IPAs around the world. It does not try to explain the reasons for strong and weak performances other than through its examination of the characteristics of performance relative to the industry’s definition of good practices as reflected in the study’s methodology. For example, it does not examine whether access to higher levels of budget and staff resources leads IPAs to perform better, or whether the degree of autonomy enjoyed by the IPA might influence performance. These are important considerations, although the answers are unlikely to be straightforward; for example, the best performing developing-economy IPAs include both large and small IPAs, some with considerable autonomy, some with less.

To help understand how IPA characteristics impact agency performance in serving the information needs of investors, MIGA is collaborating with the World Bank’s Development Research Group (DECRG) in a complementary study that is gathering data on the characteristics of IPAs (including MIGA’s entire sample of IPAs). MIGA aims to explore such issues further through more detailed analysis of characteristics against IPA performance.


WEB SITE ASSESSMENT

The developing-economy IPAs performed considerably more strongly in the Web site assessment than in the two inquiry-handling exercises. This may indicate that many IPAs have made the initial investments in communication technologies, but have not yet developed the organizational systems and skills needed to successfully interact with and support inward investors.

Within the overall Web site score, developing-economy IPAs scored relatively better on site architecture (58.6 percent) and design (79.1 percent), and significantly lower on the quantity and quality of investor-relevant content (38.1 percent). Within the latter category, IPAs scored particularly low on availability of sector information (28.9 percent) and on downloads of relevant information (25.7 percent).

In most cases, the IPAs’ Web sites provided only superficial details about the economy. The selection of information and key marketing messages often showed a lack of finesse. Sites tended not to present detailed information about target industries and business activities, nor were they good at combining information in a way that demonstrated the locations’ attractiveness for investment.

One possible conclusion is that many IPAs have made greater progress on technical issues, such as Web site design and architecture, than on the critical challenge of developing and disseminating investor information. In recent years, developing countries have received a significant amount of assistance for the development of Web sites and Internet connectivity. Much of that assistance has focused on the technical side. Clearly, there remains a need for further assistance to build capacity in content development and promotional activities.

INQUIRY-HANDLING ASSESSMENT

The main areas of weakness in inquiry handling among the developing-economy IPAs were customer care (where IPAs averaged just 9.8 percent) and the quality of response (27.9 percent). Better average scores were recorded for responsiveness and handling (40.6 percent) and availability and contactability (61.1 percent).

The inquiry-handling exercises revealed that many frontline IPA staff members at the surveyed IPAs are unable to field inquiries correctly. Although some IPAs and particular project managers acquitted themselves very well in the inquiry-handling exercises, most of the agencies struggled to provide a professional service in their responses.

The survey revealed problems at the IPAs ranging from basic failures in their primary means of interfacing with investors to more significant organizational failures and general capability issues. In some cases, it was difficult to contact the IPA because contact details on the Web site were incorrect or e-mails went unanswered. The reviewers also encountered process-related and other organizational issues: in some cases, poorly trained frontline staff were unable to forward calls to appropriate project managers; in other cases, disinterested or hostile project managers told the callers to find information themselves or said they were “too busy” to help. In many instances, a project manager stated a willingness to help but then failed to provide a response or provided a response long after the deadline had passed (a month after, in one case).


KEY CONCLUSIONS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR IPAS

Summarizing the implications very broadly, there appear to be two main dimensions of IPA performance that need to be considered for improvement. The first encompasses investors’ access to the IPA, the availability of good contact information, the IPA’s systems, behaviors, and its customer and technical skills. The second encompasses the quantity and quality of the investor information that the IPA is able to provide.

The first area is often more clearly under the direct “control” of the IPA, depending on the quality and service orientation of its management, as well as the financial and human resources available relative to the desired levels of customer service. IPAs are encouraged to assess their systems and procedures and the skills base of involved staff against the results of this review in order to determine where improvements can be made. MIGA is working with a number of client countries to assist in this process and to help them develop work plans to address identified issues.

The second area, on the other hand, is usually less directly under the control of the IPA, reflecting to a great extent the general quality of the information available on the economy and the business sector. It is recommended that IPAs undertake a review of the available investor information and sources to assess whether they currently have the best and most up-to-date sources available. Similarly, IPAs are encouraged to find ways to access better or more specialized information, for example, through partnering with other organizations that might be better able to provide this information.

IPAs in some economies, particularly less developed ones with weak or non-existent capacity to generate economic statistics, or where there are less transparent investment environments, might find it difficult to access and to provide such information. In such situations, remedying these weaknesses is usually neither easy nor inexpensive. Much of the information needed is not under the control of the IPA.

Nevertheless, even in such difficult situations there are still some cost-effective steps that the IPA can take to improve the quality and availability of investor information. It is important, for example, for the IPA to have a clear appreciation of the quality and accuracy of the information that does exist in order to offer investors guidance on relevant and available information. Also, as noted above, the IPA can seek to partner with other organizations that might have better information or access to information from recognized international sources. Similarly, the IPA can often play a role in seeking out sources of investor information within government and helping the relevant ministry or department to get the information into a shape and quality for release to investors.

More specifically, the report highlights the following implications:

• A significant number of developing-economy IPAs (at least 50 percent of the survey sample) are not yet providing the levels of service and information that investors expect. As a result, it is likely that many developing-economy IPAs are receiving less contact and attention from investors than they could receive if they performed better.

• IPAs that are not able to provide investors with good service and relevant information are unlikely to be called upon to assist with investment projects. As a result, these IPAs are likely to have difficulty demonstrating that they add value to investors.

• It is also likely that IPAs that cannot demonstrate their value to investors and that are seen not to be delivering investment for their locations, will soon find that their value is also questioned by their home governments and other stakeholders.

• IPAs performed relatively more strongly in the Web site assessment than in the two inquiry-handling exercises. This seems to indicate that the IPAs have made initial investments in communication technologies, but have not yet developed the


organizational systems and skills they need to successfully interact with and support inward investors. IPAs need to balance their adoption of technology with the development of organizational and client-facing skills.

• Most IPAs need to develop better information that addresses the location factors critical to prospective investors’ decision-making processes. In particular, they need to identify the sectors and industries in which their locations can attract FDI and then develop detailed sector information to support both their targeted searches for investment in those sectors as well as their ability to respond effectively to investors’ direct inquiries. This requires clearly understanding the industries they are seeking to attract and knowing enough about their own economies’ capabilities to add value to the investors’ decision-making. IPAs should revisit their Web sites to see whether they provide enough information of genuine value to investors.

• IPAs should aspire to develop unique and detailed investment information, packaged suitably for investors’ needs, and that can be provided to investors. Ideally, that information (or at least the specific presentation of it) should be obtainable only from the IPA, so that the IPA becomes a necessary and influential player in the location evaluation process.

• The review revealed a fundamental lack of marketing sophistication among most of the sample group. IPAs need to be able to demonstrate how the assets of their locations translate into advantages for specific investors. Many of the surveyed IPAs failed completely to make such linkages.

• Most of the surveyed IPAs exhibited weak or nonexistent systems for receiving, handling, and responding to investor inquiries. In many cases, whether the investor received a response or not often seemed to depend on factors such as whether the right person was available on the day the inquiry was received. To address this area, IPAs should audit the capabilities of their frontline staff and project managers and develop plans to enhance their capabilities in these areas.

• Most of the surveyed IPAs did not appear to appreciate the need for an integrated inquiry-handling system. On too many occasions, the consultants were passed back and forth between teams and people within the IPA, a sign that the agency had no clear idea who should handle the inquiry. IPAs should aim to integrate their service offerings so they can be monitored and continuously improved, not just to achieve better performance in discrete elements of the process, such as responsiveness and handling, but also in the process overall.

• There appears to be a real need for capacity building in the softer aspects of inquiry handling at IPAs: communications and customer care, internal investor handling systems, filing and records systems, preparation of responses, report writing, and so on.

• Many of the IPAs surveyed exhibited a significant variation in performance between the two inquiries, another indication that the overall system for inquiry handling is weak or nonexistent. One of the main benefits of instituting a more systematic approach to communications and inquiry handling is that the inquirer should be able to expect a good level of service and response every time, not very good some times or very poor other times. The participating IPAs should review their inquiry-handling systems to identify the bottlenecks and constraints resulting in variable performance (for example, is the entire system built around one person’s availability?).


LOOKING FORWARD

As noted above, MIGA’s 2006 review is the first in a program of planned IPA performance reviews. The intention is to create a rolling program of studies on important aspects of IPA performance that will enable each participating IPA to benchmark its performance against others in its region and globally. Hopefully as a result, IPAs will be in a better position to learn from experiences elsewhere and to put in place initiatives and efforts to upgrade their performance.

MIGA is currently developing detailed plans for the Investment Promotion Agency Performance Review 2007, and these will be announced soon. As part of the future program, MIGA intends to repeat the current study to examine changes in performance across the sample of IPAs. Critical lessons learned during the course of the current review—one of the most comprehensive IPA performance studies conducted to date—will be incorporated into the future research program.

In particular, MIGA intends to consider how best to handle the following issues:

• MIGA will widen its coverage of subnational IPAs in future studies to create a more representative sample in order to allow the presentation of more detailed analysis, including national versus subnational IPA comparisons;

• MIGA will seek to develop a wider range of relevant benchmarks for IPAs, for example, perhaps through the development of regional best-practice and external benchmarks;

• MIGA will seek to widen the coverage of the study to include other types of investment promotion intermediaries, perhaps including non-traditional IPAs such as private sector bodies, chambers of commerce, and other organizations that undertake similar functions; and,

• It has been suggested that more value could be achieved in the published results if the details for individual IPAs were presented, thus providing more granular information on performance. Publication of individual IPA results might also act as an incentive for participating IPAs to improve their performance. MIGA will review the pros and cons of taking such an approach.

Similarly, MIGA has also identified a number of important areas for further research and investigation. More specifically, working in partnership, MIGA and the World Bank’s DECRG will undertake joint research to combine the performance data collected in this study with that from the current DECRG study on IPA characteristics. The research is intended to shed light on the importance of factors such as budget and staff resources, the range of functions undertaken by IPAs, and organizational structure in explaining differential IPA performance.


Appendices

1. Acronyms Used in This Report

2. Participating IPAs by Region

3. Factor Weights for Results Analysis

4. Descriptions of Inquiry-Handling Projects

5. Tables of Results


Appendix 1. Acronyms Used in This Report

DECRG World Bank Development Research Group

EAP East Asia and Pacific

EBP Enterprise Benchmarking Program

ECA Europe and Central Asia

EDB Economic Development Board

EU European Union

FDI foreign direct investment

ICT information communications technology

IPA investment promotion agency

KLF key location factor

LAC Latin America and Caribbean

MENA Middle East and North Africa

MIGA Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency

SA South Asia

SSA Sub-Saharan Africa

UK United Kingdom


Appendix 2. Participating IPAs by Region

MIGA region and country IPA

Best-practice IPAs

Czech Republic Czech Invest

Denmark Invest in Denmark

Hong Kong Invest Hong Kong

Netherlands Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency

UK-Mersey The Mersey Partnership

UK-Yorkshire Yorkshire Forward

Australia-Victoria Invest Victoria

Scotland Scottish Development International

Singapore EDB Singapore

Sweden Invest in Sweden

UK-National UK Trade & Investment

East Asia and Pacific

Cambodia Council for the Development of Cambodia

China-CIPA China Investment Promotion Agency (CIPA)

China-Dongguan China – Dongguan Foreign Investment Promotion Center

China-Harbin Harbin Economic Cooperation Promotion Bureau (HECPB)

China-HIPB Heilongjiang Investment Promotion Bureau (HIPB)

China-Sichuan Sichuan Investment Promotion Bureau

China-Xiamen Xiamen International Investment Promotion Center

Cook Islands Cook Islands Development Investment Board

Fiji Fiji Islands Trade & Investment Board (FITIB)

French Polynesia Tahiti Invest

Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board (Badan Koordinasi Penanaman Modal – BKPM)

Kiribati Ministry of Finance and Economic Development

Korea Invest Korea

Laos Laos Department of Domestic & Foreign Investment

Mongolia Foreign Investment and Foreign Trade Agency (FIFTA)

New Caledonia New Caledonia Economic Development Agency (ADECAL)

Niue Niue Investment Promotion Agency

Palau Palau Foreign Investment Board

Papua New Guinea PNG Investment Promotion Authority

Philippines-BOI Board of Investments (BOI)



Philippines-Bohol Bohol Investment Promotion Center

Philippines-CEBU Cebu Investment Promotion Center

Philippines-Davao Davao City Investment Promotion Center

Philippines-Naga Naga City Investment Promotion Center

Philippines-Negros Negros Oriental Investment Promotion Center

Philippines-Oro Oro Business Promotion Center

Solomon Islands Department of Commerce, Industries and Employment

Thailand Office of the Board of Investment (BOI)

Vietnam Vietnam Foreign Investment Agency

Europe and Central Asia (EU members)

Estonia Estonian Investment Agency (EIA)

Latvia Latvian Development Agency (LIDA)

Lithuania Lithuanian Development Agency (LDA)

Slovak Republic Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency (SARIO)

Slovenia Slovenian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (TIPO)

Europe and Central Asia (others)

Albania Albanian Foreign Investment Promotion Agency (ANIH)

Armenia Armenian Development Agency (ADA)

Azerbaijan Azerbaijan Investments Promotion and Advisory Foundation (AIPAF)

Bosnia-Herzegovina Foreign Investment Promotion Agency of Bosnia-Herzegovina (FIPA)

Bulgaria Bulgarian Foreign Investment Agency (BFIA)

Croatia Trade and Investment Promotion Agency

Georgia Invest in Georgia – Georgian National Investment and Export Promotion Agency (GNIEPA)

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan Investment Promotion Center (Kazinvest)

Macedonia MacInvest – Agency for Foreign Investments of the Republic of Macedonia

Montenegro Montenegrin Investment Promotion Agency (MIPA)

Romania Romanian Agency for Foreign Investments (ARIS)

Serbia-SIEPA Serbian Investment & Export Promotion Agency (SIEPA)

Serbia-VIPF Vojvodina Investment Promotion Fund

Latin America and Caribbean

Belize Belize Trade and Investment Development Services (BELTRAIDE)

Bolivia Centro de Promoción Bolivia (CEPROBOL)

Chile Corporación de Formento de la Producción (CORFO)

Colombia Proexport Colombia

Costa Rica Coalición Costarricense de Iniciativas para el Desarrollo (CINDE)



Cuba Centro de Promoción de Inversiones (CPI)

Dominican Republic Centro de Exportación e Inversión de la República Dominicana (CEI-RD)

Ecuador Corporación de Promoción de Exportaciones e Inversiones del Ecuador (CORPEI)

El Salvador Comisión Nacional de Promoción de Inversiones (PROESA)

Guatemala Invest in Guatemala (IIG)

Honduras Fundación para la Inversión y Desarrollo de Exportaciones (FIDE)

Jamaica Jamaica Promotions Corporation (JAMPRO)

Nicaragua ProNicaragua

Trinidad and Tobago The Tourism and Industrial Development Company of Trinidad and Tobago (TIDCO)

Venezuela Consejo Nacional de Promoción de Inversiones (CONAPRI)

Middle East and North Africa

Algeria Agence Nationale de Développement des Investissements (ANDI)

Djibouti Agence Nationale pour la Promotion des Investissements (ANPI)

Egypt General Authority for Investment & Free Zones (GAFI)

Emirates-JAFZA Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority (JAFZA)

Emirates-DAFZA Dubai Airport Free Zone Authority (DAFZA)

Emirates-DDIA Dubai Development and Investment Authority (DDIA)

Jordan Jordan Investment Board (JIB)

Lebanon Investment Development Authority of Lebanon (IDAL)

Morocco Ministère de l'Economie et des Finances

Oman Omani Centre for Investment Promotion & Export Development (OCIPED)

Palestine Palestinian Investment Promotion Agency (PIPA)

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA)

Tunisia Foreign Investment Promotion Agency (FIPA)

Yemen (Republic of) General Investment Authority (GIA)

South Asia

Afghanistan Afghan Investment Support Agency

Bangladesh Board of Investment (BOI)

India Maharashtra Economic Development Council

Pakistan Pakistan Board of Investment

Sri Lanka Board of Investment of Sri Lanka (BOI)



Sub-Saharan Africa

Angola National Agency of Private Investment (ANIP)

Botswana Botswana Export Development and Investment Authority (BEDIA)

Burkina Faso Direction Générale du Développement Industriel (DGDI)

Cameroon Cellule de Gestion du Code des Investissements (CGCI)

Cape Verde Center for Investment, Export & Tourism Promotion (PROMEX)

Congo (Democratic Republic of)

Agence Nationale pour la Promotion des Investissements (ANAPI)

Ethiopia Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC)

Gambia The Gambia Investment Promotion and Free Zones Agency (GIPFZA)

Ghana Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC)

Kenya Investment Promotion Centre (IPC)

Lesotho Lesotho National Development Corporation (LNDC)

Malawi Malawi Investment Promotion Agency (MIPA)

Mauritius Board of Investment of Mauritius

Centro de Promoção de Investimentos (CPI) Mozambique

Namibia Namibia Investment Centre, Ministry of Trade and Industry

Nigeria Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC)

Rwanda Rwanda Investment Promotion Agency (RIPA)

Senegal Investment Promotion and Major Works Agency (APIX)

South Africa-DIPA Durban Investment Promotion Agency (DIPA)

South Africa-INW Invest North West (INW)

South Africa-MII Mpumalanga Investment Initiative

South Africa-TIL Trade and Investment Limpopo

South Africa-WESGRO WESGRO

South Africa-Coega Coega Development Corporation

South Africa-ECDC Eastern Cape Development Corporation

South Africa-FSDC Free State Development Corporation (FSDC)

South Africa-GEDA Gauteng Economic Development Agency (GEDA)

South Africa-TIKZN Trade & Investment KwaZulu Natal (TIKZN)

South Africa-TISA Trade and Investment South Africa (TISA)

Swaziland Swaziland Investment Promotion Authority (SIPA)

Tanzania Zanzibar Investment Promotion Agency (ZIPA)

Uganda Uganda Investment Authority (UIA)

Zambia Zambia Investment Centre (ZIC)


Appendix 3. Factor Weights for Results Analysis

During the assessments, scores were assigned to the participating IPAs for each of the questions identified in the methodology for evaluating the IPA Web sites and inquiry- handling practices. These scores were then weighted to reflect the relative importance of each question, based on MIGA’s and the consultants’ experiences in working with investors. The resulting weighted scores were then indexed against the highest score achieved for each question by a participating IPA, which allowed the results to be analyzed and compared in a context reflecting an achievable, rather than a theoretical performance benchmark. The factor weights that were applied to the Web site and inquiry-handling scores are outlined below.

WEB SITE ASSESSMENT

Dimension and theme Weight

Information architecture 20

Web friendly structure

Ease of navigation

30

Web functionality

40

30

Design 10

Look and feel

Readability

60

40

Content 50

Clarity of purpose

Core information

Sector information

Credibility of information

Currency of information

Downloads

International accessibility

10

30

20

10

10

10

10

Promotional effectiveness 20

Branding

Corporate roles and messages

Contact information

Promotional effectiveness

Web prominence

10

10

30

40

10


INQUIRY-HANDLING

Dimension and theme Weight

Availability and contactability 15

Web availability 50

Quality of contact details 50

Responsiveness and handling 30

E-mail and phone responsiveness

E-mail handling

Call handling

Inquiry-handling competence and responsiveness

30

10

10

50

Response 40

Provision of interim response

Quality of interim response

Formatting of full response

Branding in full response

Organization of full response

5

5

10

5

10

Quality answers in full response 40

Credibility of answers in full response 10

Business case in full response 15

Customer care 15

Follow up 100


Appendix 4. Inquiry-Handling Exercise Project Descriptions

FIRST INQUIRY-HANDLING EXERCISE

The first inquiry related to a food-processing project. Food production was selected because every economy has some level of food-production capability. For the best-practice agencies, the inquiry also incorporated a small research and development (R&D) element to increase their motivation to respond. (Many IPAs in developed economies prioritize R&D and may take the view that there is little need for government intervention in general food manufacturing.)

Inquiry 1. Food production (developing economies)

Overview Location requirements

The clients were said to be planning to establish a small regional office and the first phase of a food-production facility to produce products for export as well as local consumption. Property needs were adjusted for the smaller economies. Job creation was estimated to be up to 200 employees in the first year. The scale of the project was reduced for some IPAs with land limitations or small populations.

• A growing local and regional market

• A stable economy

• Open and business-friendly regulations

• Good infrastructure that could support a small production facility

• Adequate road, rail, and air or sea infrastructure for exporting

• Sufficiently skilled personnel to staff the food production facility and to manage a regional office

Inquiry 1. Food production with R&D elements (best-practice IPAs)


The client (confidential) was said to be a snack-food producer seeking to develop a healthier snack food. It was seeking suitable locations for the first phase of a food-production facility with an R&D component that would eventually reach 100,000 sq. ft. (9,300 sq. m.) including lab space. Job creation was to be 120 employees (50 in the R&D component).

• A strong snack food market


• Good road, rail, and air infrastructure

• Availability of scientists and lab technicians

• Appropriate property availability


Common elements of Inquiry 1

Inquiry 1 requested that IPAs address the following subject areas to aid decision- making and to help short-list potential locations:

• Key economic indicators, such as gross domestic product (GDP), GDP per capita, inflation, and GDP growth (stating, where possible, the date of the information and the source)

• Business registration and taxation

• A general overview of infrastructure (communications, road, rail, ports and airports)

• Workforce skills and average wages

• Other major foreign investors in the region, especially food producers and manufacturers

• An outline of the services that the IPA provides for foreign investors.

IPAs were free to provide additional information if they believed that it would support their cases.

SECOND INQUIRY-HANDLING EXERCISE

For the second inquiry, the intention in all cases was to give the IPA the best possible opportunity to excel. In order to do so, the researchers allocated an inquiry to each IPA based on the known economic strengths of each location and the IPA’s individual sectoral foci (inferred from the Web site). The allocation was then verified by MIGA. Adjustments were made in a small number of cases where MIGA staff believed that alternative projects were more appropriate.

For this inquiry, a number of developed IPAs elected to test one of their offshore offices. However, for developing economies the main or head office was tested in all cases.

Developing economies were allocated one of the following projects:

• Garment manufacturing

• Beverage production

• Electronics assembly

• Customer service center / data processing facility

Best-practice agencies were allocated one of the following projects:

• Customer service center / data processing facility

• Software (games) development


Inquiry 2. Garment manufacturing (developing economies)


The consultants stated in the inquiry that they were advising a well-known garment manufacturing company on potential locations for a new cutting and sewing operation that would export to international markets, primarily in the United States and Europe. The total number of employees in the first year was said to be around 70–100, with the potential to grow when the facility became fully operational. The new facility was expected to employ a mix of full-time and part-time staff in a variety of roles at operational, production, and management levels.

• Existing capability

• Staff skills




• Adequate road, rail, and air/sea infrastructure for exporting

Inquiry 2. Beverage production (developing economies)


The consultants stated in the inquiry that they were advising a well-known beverages company on potential locations for a new production operation. The facility would produce the client’s own brands, as well as other products under contract to other firms. The total number of employees in the first year was said to be around 70–100, with the potential to grow when the facility became fully operational. The new facility was expected to employ a mix of full-time and part-time staff in a variety of roles at operational, production, and management levels.


• Staff skills






Inquiry 2. Electronics assembly


• Existing capability The consultants stated in the inquiry that they were advising a well-known electronic equipment company on potential locations for a new electronics-assembly operation. The facility would produce hand-held electronic equipment, as well as additional electronic products under license to other firms. The total number of employees in the first year was said to be around 70–100, with the potential to grow when the facility became fully operational. The new facility was expected to employ a mix of full-time and part-time staff in a variety of roles at operational, production, and management levels. Assembled components were said to be destined for markets across Europe and the Middle East, the United States, and Asia-Pacific. The client was said to intend to source most components locally but would likely have to import some components, at least in the first few years of operations.

• Staff skills





Inquiry 2. Customer service center / data processing facility (both groups)


The consultants stated in the inquiry that they were advising a well-known international bank on potential locations for a new customer service and data processing facility. The new center would provide customer support to the client’s existing customers and handle a number of administrative functions. The total number of employees in the first year was said to be around 70–100, with the potential to grow when the facility became fully operational. The new facility was expected to employ a mix of full-time and part-time staff in a variety of roles at operational, administrative, and management levels.


• Staff skills




• Good air connections to major U.S. and European business centers


Inquiry 2. Software (games) production (best-practice IPAs)


The consultants stated in the inquiry that they were advising an international computer game company on potential locations for a new software engineering studio. The studio would be used to develop entertainment products for mobile phones, PCs, consoles, and next-generation entertainment devices, and to carry out technology research and development. The total number of employees in the first year was said to be around 40–50 staff, with the potential to grow significantly when the facility became fully operational. The new facility was expected to employ a range of highly skilled technical staff, including programmers, designers, engineers, project managers, researchers, and marketing professionals, as well as a range of administrative support staff.


• Staff skills




• Good air connections to major U.S. and European business centers

Common elements of Inquiry 2

Inquiry 2 requested that IPAs address the following subject areas to aid decision- making and to help short-list potential locations:

• Key economic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), GDP per capita, inflation, and GDP growth (stating, where possible, the date of the information and the source)

• Business registration and taxation

• A general overview of infrastructure (communications, road, rail, ports and airports)

• Workforce skills and average wages

• Other major foreign investors in the region, specifically related to the sector of the inquiry

• An outline of the services that the IPA provides for foreign investors.

IPAs were free to provide additional information if they believed that it would support their cases.


Appendix 5. Tables of Results

This appendix includes tables of the weighted and indexed final scores, reflecting the study’s key results from various perspectives. Four main comparators within the sample help illustrate the context of the scores: the highest score achieved by a participating IPA, the average of the top five IPAs, the average of the developing-economy IPAs, and the averages of the developing-economy IPAs by region. This data was used as the basis for the figures shown in this report. (Each table’s corresponding figure is noted beneath the table, when applicable.)

Table 5-1. Developing-economy IPA scores, averaged by region and compared with top five IPAs

Percent

Web site Inquiry

handling Combined

score

Highest score achieved 100.0 93.7 96.8

Top five IPAs 91.6 88.1 89.8



Europe and Central Asia (other) 53.9 46.0 49.9

Developing economies (average) 51.0 37.3 44.1




South Asia 51.5 22.0 36.7

Note: See also Figure 8.


Table 5-2. Variance between highest and lowest scores, by region and compared with top five IPAs

Percent

Highest score Lowest score Variance

Top five IPAs 96.8 85.2 11.6





Europe and Central Asia (other) 71.5 29.5 42.0


South Asia 44.7 20.7 24.0

Table 5-3. Web site assessment scores, by region and dimension of quality

Percent

Top five IPAs

ECA (EU) LAC

ECA (other) MENA SA EAP SSA

Combined score 91.6 72.6 54.2 53.9 52.7 51.5 47.6 47.4

Information architecture 93.8 72.9 57.5 57.9 66.9 55.1 52.5 59.6

Design 97.0 80.6 84.2 84.4 93.4 81.8 75.7 70.9

Content 80.1 68.3 41.0 42.7 36.0 40.4 35.6 33.2

Promotional effectiveness 91.4 60.6 53.7 47.8 44.6 46.5 45.3 45.2



Table 5-4. Web site assessment scores, by theme

Percent

Top five IPAs (average)

Developing-economy IPAs

(average) Variance

Branding 100.0 83.3 16.7

Look and feel 100.0 81.8 18.2

Web site functionality 100.0 76.6 23.4

Reading ease 92.5 75.0 17.5

Web prominence 86.0 71.5 14.5

Navigation ease 92.0 58.1 33.9

International accessibility 94.7 55.4 39.3

Corporate roles and messages 93.0 53.5 39.5

Site clarity of purpose 76.0 51.9 24.1

Contact information 91.0 44.2 46.8

Web-friendly structure 90.0 41.2 48.8

Credibility of information 74.0 40.7 33.3

Core information provision 81.1 38.9 42.2

Promotional effectiveness 90.5 32.7 57.8

Sector information provision 63.5 28.9 34.6

Downloads 83.3 25.7 57.6

Currency of information 80.8 22.5 58.3

Combined score 91.6 51.0 40.6



Table 5-5. Web site assessment scores, by theme and region

Percent

Top five IPAs

ECA (EU) LAC

ECA (other) MENA SA EAP SSA

Look and feel 100.0 76.0 92.0 86.2 94.3 88.0 77.2 73.9

Branding 100.0 80.0 100.0 76.9 92.9 100.0 72.4 81.8

Web functionality 100.0 90.4 81.7 84.5 81.4 76.4 69.0 73.8

International accessibility 94.7 70.7 70.9 50.0 52.4 60.0 55.1 49.0

Corporate roles and messages 93.0 72.0 53.7 47.3 46.1 51.0 48.8 60.7

Reading ease 92.5 87.5 72.5 81.7 92.0 72.5 73.3 66.3

Navigation ease 92.0 69.3 60.0 58.2 68.6 65.3 50.3 56.8

Contact information 91.0 54.3 44.8 42.7 39.5 48.0 46.3 42.6

Promotional effectiveness 90.5 53.9 41.7 38.7 29.8 20.3 30.9 27.7

Web-friendly structure 90.0 60.0 30.0 30.8 50.0 20.0 38.8 49.2

Web prominence 86.0 74.7 81.3 69.7 68.1 86.7 67.9 69.6

Downloads 83.3 81.7 37.8 44.2 21.4 35.0 10.6 18.2

Core information provision 81.1 66.4 37.1 38.8 44.9 44.5 39.0 32.3

Currency of information 80.8 35.8 13.3 26.3 23.8 30.0 22.6 21.3

Site clarity of purpose 76.0 55.8 54.5 55.8 55.1 39.0 51.7 49.5

Credibility of information 74.0 78.0 39.7 45.8 39.3 33.0 43.6 32.9

Sector information provision 63.5 71.3 35.1 37.9 13.1 31.7 23.3 27.2


Table 5-6. Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by region

Percent

Top five IPAs

ECA (EU)

ECA (other) SSA EAP LAC MENA SA

Combined score 88.1 68.6 50.4 46.0 37.1 30.0 24.7 22.0

Inquiry 1 81.2 70.1 53.6 44.7 37.8 33.5 26.6 23.6

Inquiry 2 95.0 67.0 47.3 45.8 36.4 26.5 22.8 20.3


Table 5-7. Combined inquiry-handling scores and average variance between performances for two exercises

Percent

Combined inquiry-

handling score Variance in inquiry-

handling scores

Highest score achieved 93.7 2.6

Top five IPAs 88.1 14.9

Europe and Central Asia (EU) 68.6 6.5

Latin America and Caribbean 50.4 9.0

Europe and Central Asia (other) 46.0 13.4

Sub-Saharan Africa 37.1 14.4

East Asia and Pacific 30.0 12.8

Middle East and North Africa 24.7 14.3

South Asia 22.0 11.2



Table 5-8. Inquiry-handling scores for two exercises, by dimension of quality

Percent

Highest score

achieved Top five IPAs All developing-economy IPAs

Inquiry

1 Inquiry

2 Inquiry

1 Inquiry

2 Inquiry

1 Inquiry

2

Combined score 95.0 92.3 81.2 95.0 39.1 35.4

Availability and contactability 96.3 100.0 76.8 80.1 60.4 61.8

Responsiveness and handling 87.4 100.0 75.5 92.7 44.2 37.0

Response 92.1 64.2 80.1 88.8 29.1 26.7

Customer care 66.7 100.0 57.8 91.1 10.1 9.5

Note: See also Figures 17 and 18.

Table 5-9. Combined inquiry-handling scores, by region and dimension of quality

Percent

Availability and contact-

ability

Responsive-ness and handling Response

Customer care

Combined score

Highest score achieved 98.1 93.7 78.2 83.3 93.7

Top five IPAs 78.4 84.1 84.5 74.4 88.1

Europe and Central Asia (EU) 72.2 77.8 59.3 35.6 68.6

Latin America and Caribbean 66.2 55.3 43.9 14.4 50.4

Europe and Central Asia (other) 63.5 52.9 38.6 8.5 46.0

Sub-Saharan Africa 57.4 39.8 29.1 11.6 37.1

East Asia and Pacific 59.0 33.2 19.1 4.6 30.0

Middle East and North Africa 60.3 23.5 13.0 6.3 24.7

South Asia 67.0 23.0 5.9 1.1 22.0



Table 5-10. Regional inquiry-handling performance against the developing-economy IPA average

Percent

SA MENA EAP SSA ECA

(other) LAC ECA (EU) Dimension

Availability and contactability 5.9 -0.8 -2.1 -3.7 2.4 5.1 11.1

Responsiveness and handling -17.6 -17.1 -7.4 -0.8 12.3 14.7 37.2

Response -22.0 -14.9 -8.8 1.2 10.6 16.0 31.4

Customer care -8.7 -3.4 -5.2 1.8 -1.2 4.6 25.8

Combined score -15.3 -12.6 -7.3 -0.1 8.7 13.2 31.3



Table 5-11. Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by theme

Percent

Theme Top five IPAs

(average)

All developing-economy IPAs

(average)

Web availability 9.3 7.4

Response format 74.4 9.8

Quality of contact details 7.3 11.5

Inquiry-handling competence & responsiveness

50.4 12.8

Call handling 82.5 14.3

E-mail and telephone responsiveness 73.5 19.6

Credibility of answers in response 87.5 22.7

Quality of answers in response 89.7 26.0

Branding in response 66.7 32.7

Organization of response 85.8 39.4

Business case in response 86.0 43.9

E-mail handling 86.8 45.1

Provision of interim response 71.3 45.4

Follow up 92.6 52.5

Quality of interim response 85.6 76.8

Combined score 88.1 37.3



Table 5-12. Inquiry-handling assessment scores, by theme and region

Percent

Theme Top five

IPAs ECA (EU) LAC

ECA (other) SSA EAP MENA SA

Quality of interim response 9.3 20.5 8.7 10.5 8.1 5.6 2.0 3.3

Follow up 74.4 35.6 14.4 8.5 11.6 4.6 6.3 1.1

Provision of interim response 7.3 21.1 18.0 14.8 12.0 9.3 2.4 8.7

E-mail handling 50.4 55.0 14.4 16.1 11.6 8.2 6.5 10.4

Business case in response 82.5 23.3 27.8 17.9 16.7 8.6 4.8 0.0

Organization of response 73.5 44.0 27.2 22.9 23.5 14.7 4.6 8.0

Branding in response 87.5 82.5 49.2 24.0 20.1 6.9 17.0 5.0

Quality of answers in response 89.7 56.0 41.7 36.2 27.8 17.1 10.9 5.3

Credibility of answers in response 66.7 71.7 50.2 50.4 31.1 22.8 15.1 11.7

E-mail and telephone responsiveness 85.8 67.2 44.3 51.1 39.7 34.1 27.4 28.9

Call handling 86.0 57.0 62.8 51.0 43.0 36.4 30.3 42.7

Inquiry-handling competence and responsiveness 86.8 90.5 67.1 60.1 43.8 36.2 22.6 17.4

Quality of contact details 71.3 60.7 47.4 52.0 40.5 43.7 43.7 52.7

Response format 92.6 97.4 71.0 76.2 51.0 42.4 35.7 5.1

Web availability 85.6 83.8 85.0 75.0 74.3 74.4 76.8 81.3

Combined score 88.1 68.6 50.4 46.0 37.1 30.0 24.7 22.0


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