When looking for information on the economic future of a specific country, you are better off searching a few specific tools rather than using Google or any big multidisciplinary tools such as Discovery or Google Scholar. Here are recommendations (not in priority order) with Mexico as the sample country:
1 . Business Source Complete – accessible from the ‘Access the A-Z database list’ link >> ‘B’ on the Library homepage.
From Business Source Complete's homepage, you'll want to limit the "Publication Type" to "Country Report", as shown below.
Then, enter the name of the country you are looking for reports on in the main search bar. (You can also search without limiting by publication type- by searching for "[country] country report"- for example, "Mexico country report".)
Depending on the country you are researching, you may find several different reports. Pay attention to the report publisher, outlined in red in the following screenshot, to distinguish the different reports and the different portions of reports from each other. Sometimes you will be offered a whole report and then a portion of that whole report, both next to each other in your results.
If there are specific aspects of the Mexican economy you want to research, for example their automotive industry, you could start with ‘mexico AND automotive’. It would be a good idea to use the date filter on the left of your results to make sure you only bring back more recently published material and also the ‘source type’ filter to focus to different types of documents such as trade publications or peer reviewed articles.
2. ABI Inform Collection, accessible from the ‘Access the A-Z database list’ link >> ‘A’ on the Library homepage.
Do a search for your country and then use the filters on the left of your results to narrow by publication date and to ‘Reports’.
3. Statista - accessible from the ‘Access the A-Z database list’ link >>’S’ on the Library homepage.
From the Statista homepage, select "Country and Region Reports" under "Reports".
Type in the name of the country you're searching for. "Country & Region Reports" contains both industry-specific information, as well as economic outlooks and key economic indicators for your selected country. If you would like to limit to a specific industry, for example, Mexico's dairy industry, you can search for "Mexico AND dairy".
4 . Passport (Global Market Information) - accessible from the ‘Access the A-Z database list’ link >>‘P’ on the Library homepage.
This tool is usually used to find industry-level perspective on markets such as pet food or cosmetics, but it can be useful when looking for country level information as well. Try a keyword search for ‘Mexico’; before you've entered the search, you will see a range of suggested statistics, analyses, and dashboards.
If you hit "enter" on the query, you'll see a more detailed range of results, split again into three categories.
5. Mergent - accessible from the ‘Access the A-Z database list’ link >> ‘M’ on the Library homepage.
This tool is mostly useful for finding financial information about publicly traded companies worldwide, but it can be useful with your country-level research on the investment environment as well. Click on the green ‘Country insight’ tab across the top and find ‘Mexico’ in the ‘Americas’ menu.
