Question: You consult the funds management on their prospective international portfolio investment strategy

CASE STUDY INFORMATION

Case/Scenario: You consult the funds management on their prospective international portfolio investment strategy. The fund managers that you work with regularly have commissioned you to provide an overview of the specific industries. Currently, the fund management is interested in cross-border services industry as one of the prospective investment directions. They want to identify historical performance and future projections of the industry in Europe, the United States, and Asia-Pacific regions. Business context: The cross-border services industry thrives on the exchange of skills, knowledge, and expertise across borders, generating significant employment opportunities and contributing substantially to the GDP of both exporting and importing nations. This industry's growth has been fueled by advancements in technology, the expansion of global supply chains, and the increasing demand for specialized services in a rapidly changing world. However, with the onset of the pandemic, the industry faced a seismic disruption, the likes of which had never been witnessed before. Social distancing measures, lockdowns, and travel restrictions brought many service-based operations to a screeching halt, leaving millions of workers unemployed and businesses on the brink of collapse. COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the sector and accelerated certain trends, such as digital transformation and remote service delivery.

Project objectives:

1. Looking at both industry and economy specific data over the past five years, is there a correlation (positive or negative) between the performance of cross-border services industry and their local jurisdiction’s GDP and other key economic metrics or events (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). If so, what may be the reasons for the correlation? Please provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis supporting any findings.

2. In addition, based on your analysis towards the Objective (1) identify future prospects, drivers of performance and risks across various jurisdictions? Please also provide any supporting analysis for these additional considerations. The key jurisdictions of interest are the US, UK, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.

COMM5000 Context

This is a business question that is based on real datasets. The role you are to play is one of a consultant contracted by funds management to assist with the analysis of data using the COMM5000 data analysis tools, which include descriptive and inferential statistics. The work will be scaffolded into two milestones M1 (20%) & M2 (20%)) and a final project report (60%). Every milestone will require you to use what you have learned to address specific aspects of the data. Generally, M1 consists of an exploratory data analysis, whereas M2 is concerned with identifying hypotheses and formulating key inferential questions. In the final project report, all the insights gathered from M1 and M2 are used to model the data to answer the project questions.

https://apaxresearchers.com/storage/files/2023/09/28/9667-tc2_13_10_53_instructions.pdf