Volume 15 • Issue 1 • PP: 14–20 • 2027
Business Intelligence for Bottleneck-Sensitive International Market Entry Screening
Open Access & Copyright
© 2027 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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An international expansion team must decide which candidate markets warrant costly commercial due diligence. Regulation-only rankings can overlook the services and operating processes needed to conduct business. We develop a reproducible business intelligence screen using the three published pillars of the World Bank’s Business Ready 2025 for 101 economies. The analysis compares a regulation-led shortlist with a noncompensatory weakest-pillar rule, tests its sensitivity to shortlist capacity and alternative aggregation, and examines a mechanical one-pillar improvement scenario. Public Services is the lowest pillar in 67 economies and Operational Efficiency in 31. Regulation exceeds services by 12.36 points on average (95% bootstrap interval 10.52–14.12). The regulation-led and bottleneck-led top 20 share 11 economies, so nine due-diligence candidates change; their equal-weight and bottleneck-led counterparts share 18. Raising the lowest pillar hypothetically by ten points increases the resulting minimum by 6.63 points on average because another pillar may become binding. The output identifies markets requiring checks of service delivery or operational execution before a site-selection decision. Its rankings are transparent decision rules applied to official scores, not World Bank rankings, investment-return estimates, or evidence of causal reform effects.
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