So what do you do if you are a nation and you want to be more competitive globally? Just like a business, practice effective global branding.

Surprisingly, non-democratic countries are just as likely these days to be interested in nation branding as democratic ones. An interesting note is that democracy creates a lot of barriers to creating and controlling an image, whereas it's much easier to control a nation's image (for better or worse) through a dictatorship or otherwise non-democratic government.