The EGS GlobalVue™ - July 2026

Today I’m releasing the latest quarterly GlobalVue™ chart, which ranks countries as places to do business — places for a company to consider expanding into. That might mean seeking a distributor for your products. It might mean licensing your franchise into a country. Or it might mean finding a joint venture partner to set up manufacturing there. Every company has limited resources to expand into new countries, and GlobalVue™ is meant to be a tool that quickly compares what it’s actually like to do business in one.

Over five decades, I’ve worked on projects in more than 40 countries. Some of those countries were hard to make money in. Some were hard to even get a foreign brand off the ground in. A few looked easy on paper and weren’t. A few looked hard and turned out to be some of the best markets I’ve worked in.

That gap — between how a country looks and how it actually performs — is why I built GlobalVue™. I wanted one consistent way to compare countries, not a gut feeling and not a headline. Over the years it’s been picked up by companies and consultancies well beyond our own clients, and we’ve kept adding data sources to sharpen it. A “1” is best. A “4” is worst. Simple on purpose.

The full chart available at the link below ranks 40 countries across nine parameters — GDP growth, market size, legal protection for foreign brands, ease of doing business, corruption, political stability, and more — averaged into one overall score.

This quarter, the UK, Poland, China, Colombia, and Italy moved up. Israel, Mexico, Turkey, and Argentina moved down. Nothing moves without a reason. Every shift traces back to a real change in one of the underlying factors.

Four of those factors are worth walking through, because they’re the ones that actually decide whether an expansion works — not just whether it looks good on a slide.

Ease of Finding New Investors tells you whether local investors and companies are actually funding new projects right now. I’ve seen plenty of companies chase a great GDP story into a country where nobody local was writing checks. The market looked right. The money wasn’t there.

Legal Concerns for International Brands is the one I tell every franchisor to read first. It’s about whether you keep control of your own brand once it’s in-market — can you enforce your trademark, can you get your IP back if a partnership falls apart. Spain, the UK, and the US score a 1. China and India score a 3. Big market and easy market are two different questions, and I’ve watched companies learn that the expensive way.

Ease of International Brand Entry isn’t about whether a country has rules. It’s about whether those rules were built to let you in or to protect the businesses already there. I’ve seen markets that looked wide open on paper where a foreign brand still spent years fighting for real traction against local competitors who already had the relationships and the real estate.

Country Political & Economic Stability is different from the other three. It’s not asking whether a market is attractive today — it’s asking whether it’ll still be attractive in three or five years. I’ve watched brands enter a market that scored well on everything, only to have a change in government undo years of work almost overnight. And instability doesn’t stay in its own lane — it drags everything else down with it. Courts stop enforcing contracts. Investors get cold feet. A country that looked like a “1” on paper starts behaving like a “3” once you’re actually operating there.

Four parameters, four questions: Will someone fund me? Will I keep what I built? Will the system let me in? Will the rules still be the rules two years from now? A country can ace one and fail another — which is exactly why I look at the overall ranking, not any single number.

To view and download the full 40 country GlobalVue™ chart please go to this link:

By the way, GlobalVue™ is a general analysis, built to compare countries against each other at a glance. If your company would like something more specific to your own brand - what we call GlobalSurvey™ - that’s a service we’ve done for more than 30 companies across 12 different business sectors. If that’s of interest, reach out to me directly at bedwards@edwardsglobal.com.