| Abstract |
In times of globalization, more rapidly changing markets and circumstances, companies that have a desire for international expansion face an increasing importance of risk management to be successful. One key component in risk assessment are country risk indexes like the country risk index presented in this thesis that guides decision makers in their choice of country for the organization’s expansion. This index thereby provides a general overview of potential risks in the risk dimensions of economic, financial, political, operational and natural risks, as well as a final overall risk index per country. The goal of this thesis is to create an assessment tool that combines multiple risk indicators for countries into one overall risk index and can, based on the assessment, be a guide for companies in their investment or collaboration decisions. After a literature comparison on the terms risk, risk management and risk indicators, it was found that weighting of indicators should be as objective as possible and that the index has to be adapted to the set goals to make an objective decision. A comparing literature review on existing statistical weighting methods was used to make this index more objective and elaborate which method suits this index best. The results of a further literature review on existing indexes in the field, underline the importance of this approach as it was found that many indexes rely on expert’s opinion in their weighting and that none of them found adequeate measures for a supply chain management focus. This is why this index provides a unique set of selected indicators in an innovative dimensional separation for supply chain management-oriented guidance. Furthermore, factor analysis (FA) was selected as the most suitable to weight the indicators. The tool construction was separated into two parts, a manual calculation part for the user for maximum user experience, and a second part with a statistics-based result, against which the user can compare their result. Concluding, the idea of a more objective weighting system is theoretically beneficial but is difficult to realize with real world data. That is due to the increased likelihood of outliers and lack of data. Thus, when wanting to use this method to weight indicators, the indicators should be selected carefully, and the sample size should be as large as possible. The master thesis consists of 89 pages, containing 27 images, 5 tables, 7 appendixes and 182 references. |
