The Public-Private choice: The case of marketing a country to investors

This article argues that in organizing to promote foreign investment, governments choose among organizational structures that have differing amounts of private and public sector involvement. In our analysis of 10 promotional agencies, we encountered three principal types of organization responsible for conducting investment promotion: government, “quasi-government,” and pr and private. The choice among these types of structure was influenced by the fact that the particular assignment had characteristics of tasks normally performed by public organizations and attributes of tasks normally performed by private organizations. Our findings from interviews with managers and investment promotion officials suggest that “quasi-government” and private promotional organizations have been more effective at investment promotion that have government organizations, perhaps because the “quasi-government” organizations were, in many cases, successful at capturing strengths of both the public and private approaches. Further, good managers found ways of overcoming some of the problems that seemed to be inherent in certain choices of structure. It is likely that the solutions we observed in these cases might be appropriate for other tasks that have some of the characteristics of tasks typically performed by government and some of the attributes of tasks typically performed by the private sector.