Data-Driven Approaches for Evaluating Countries in the International Construction Market

International construction projects are inherently more risky than domestic projects with multi-dimensional uncertainties that require complementary risk management at both the country and project levels. However, despite a growing need for systematic country evaluations, most studies have focused on project-level decisions and lack country-based approaches for firms in the construction industry. Accordingly, this study suggests data-driven approaches for evaluating countries using two quantitative models. The first is a two-stage country segmentation model that not only screens negative countries based on country attractiveness (macro-segmentation) but also identifies promising countries based on the level of past project performance in a given country (micro-segmentation). The second is a multi-criteria country segmentation model that combines a firm's business objective with the country evaluation process based on Kraljic's matrix and fuzzy preference relations (FPR). These models utilize not only secondary data from internationally reputable institutions but also performance data on Korean firms from 1990 to 2014 to evaluate 29 countries. The proposed approaches enable firms to enhance their decision-making capacity for evaluating and selecting countries at the early stage of corporate strategy development.