GLOBAL MARKETPLACE

FONTAINEBLEAU, France - You can never be too rich, too fit - or in today’s global marketplace, too well-informed. As any harried executive can attest, one company’s ignorance is its competitor’s edge.

   Well, better add this to the office library: a new four-volume reference set that uses statistics to recast the world into linguistic, religious, ethnic and national zones. Despite page after page of charts and numbers, the books make for gripping reading. An ordinary market study may never again suffice.
   Say you want to open a factory in Indonesia. The “Cross-Cultural Statistical Encyclopedia of the World” portrays the island nation in a series of unlikely contexts. Like any economic overview, it shows Indonesia’s official languages, number of ports and runways, and reserves of bauxite, petroleum, and other natural resources.
   But the books also compare the Indonesian-speaking community’s rainfall, elevation and earthquake risk with those environmental factors of the Xhosa-speaking community of South Africa - as well as with 460 of the world’s other linguistic groups.
   The books examine the income and eating habits of Indonesia’s prevailing religious faith, Muslim. They even compare Islamic murder rates, literacy levels, censorship laws and life expectancy with those of Baptists, Roman Catholics, Jews and 80 other religions world-wide.

Beyond Per Capita Income
   The author of this hefty tome is Philip M. Parker, an associate marketing professor at the European Institute of Business Administration, or Insead, the business school outside Paris. He started to compile the data about five years ago after a frustrating attempt to build models for market demand while acting as a consultant for an international corporate client. Traditional variables such as income per capita only told part of the story. To better understand what people want and how much they consume, Mr. Parker sought to create new analytical tools.
   The U.S. expatriate has a doctorate in business economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and has been guest lecturer at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.< But he prides himself on being an economic contrarian, and he does have a hidden agenda. At the heart of Mr. Parker’s research is a broad quest to recast economic wealth and its sources by returning to a wider context of old.
   The Scottish economist Adam Smith and Charles-Louis Montesquieu, the French philosopher, get heavily cited in introductory chapters to each volume of statistics. The two 18th-century thinkers believed that physical features such as climate and terrain hold powerful sway over a nation’s prospects for economic development. Even Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine born in 460 B.C., submitted that human cultures and mores reflect the environment in which they live.

Theory of Human Behavior
   “Back then, that was as close to political economics as you could get,” Mr. Parker jokes.
   Montesquieu, the real visionary in the field, predicted that southern Europe and southern Asia would be slower to industrialize than their northern counterparts, and that southern Europeans would be happier with fewer goods than northern Europeans, though the latter would achieve greater wealth. He wrote of suicide, crime, industrialization, and investments in human capital and technology - all in the context of what Mr. Parker terms in a physio-economic theory of human behavior.
   “What I found astonishing is that most of (Mr. Parker’s) work originated so long ago but that no one today has done any statistical analytical work that proves it or disproves it,” says Fiorangelo Salvatorelli, a visiting professor at Insead from Oxford University.
   The job wasn’t for everyone. It took six months just to break down religious groups according to nationality, an ordeal that had Mr. Parker buried in tables from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the United Nations, and various ecumenical groups. John Little, a marketing professor at MIT who has followed Mr. Parker’s effort, calls the encyclopedia “a tour de force in data collection.”
   Mr. Salvatorelli believes his colleague’s numbers will be widely disseminated, especially once they are available electronically. “A lot of his points fit clearly with not only Montesquieu,” he says, “but with common sense and reality.”

Satisfying Our Needs
   Included in each volume of the encyclopedia is a treatise on Mr. Parker’s notion of physio-economics. He asserts that people spend 80% of their incomes to satisfy physiological needs related to climate, topography, and other natural forces. These intrinsic realities - say, living in a rainy climate or on a mountain top - drive not only world consumption patterns but also an inclination to work and earn money.
   Consider the Europe of today, as portrayed by Mr. Parker. According to “National Cultures of the World,” Belgians consume a whopping 3,850 calories a day on average, compared to 3,490 calories per day by Italians, who have a reputation for four-course meals. In fact, damp and cloudy Belgium takes in more food per capita than any country in the world. Who is the global leader in Internet connections? Not sunny Spain but remote Finland. “Economists today tend to focus on human capital, entrepreneurial traditions, and technology,” Mr. Parker says. “I’m interested in what creates these variables to begin with.”
   One of the most revealing of Mr. Parker’s volumes is the slim “Religious Cultures of the World.” Though religion rarely comes up in market strategy sessions, in many parts of the world it is a defining - even the defining - characteristic of the population. Mr. Parker breaks out all the ordinary measures - living standards, culture and language; raw material reserves, land and sea resources - according to the world’s major religions, to fascinating effect. The world’s richest religions are Protestant groups such as Lutherans, Episcopalians and Baptists. Fringe Protestant groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Mennonites, and Pentecostals also rate in the top 15.
   But Shinto, the main religion of Japan, rates third in income per capita, behind two Lutheran groupings. “Was it Protestantism that led to capitalism?” asks Mr. Parker conspiratorially, challenging a longheld assumption in the U.S. and much of Europe. Japan isn’t a Protestant country, he notes, “and it’s very prosperous indeed.”
   Mr. Parker’s explanation for religious disparities is simple. “Some religious groups have better access to resources than others,” he says. Protestantism also is most common in cold-climate areas of the world, where people have to work more to satisfy their greater basic needs (for winter coats, food, antifreeze for the car).
   Against this backdrop, Mr. Parker has come to question the prevailing view that global economies are converging. People the world over may be compelled to order the same beer or smoke the same brand of cigarette, but they will persist in consuming these products in different ways and quantities. To understand such demand nuances, Mr. Parker argues, is to unlock the secret of today’s global marketplace.
   Certain industries already appreciate this. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are well aware that demand for drugs to treat allergies, depression, ulcers and other common ailments is strongly influenced by natural forces such as climate. Major soda and candy makers change the sweetness of their products according to geographical zones. Mr. Parker says tobacco companies even know that the closer people live to the equator, the more inclined they are to buy cigarettes one at a time.
   “This is the only model I know of that truly explains international consumer behavior,” says Nader Tavassoli, an assistant marketing professor at MIT who has followed Mr. Parker’s work and supports his theory of physioeconomics. “What’s fascinating about the approach is the way he’s built it from the bottom up,” through the volumes of data. “It shows that it is not humans that are different, but their environments,” says Mr. Tavassoli.
   Mr. Parker says, “The more you understand, the better you can sell your products. Executives are very quick to accept this.”
   As for traditional economists, with their complex models of income and industrial development, Mr. Tavassoli agrees with Mr. Parker’s prediction that he may be viewed as a homeopath who claims a Chinese root cures cancer. “International economists have ignored this subject for 200 years, and there will be a lot of resistance” within the academic establishment, says the MIT professor. “But this really is a foundation for future theories. (Mr. Parker) is saying here, world, consider this.”

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