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The imperatives of globalization are clear across many industries: firms must look to expand into international markets to survive and thrive. This study complements and extends a growing body of work developing and using overall market opportunity indexes (OMOIs) based on Cavusgil (1997) to rank the attractiveness of potential foreign markets. The index developed in this paper assesses countries’ market potential beyond the traditional measures of market size and economic development by also including political risk, economic freedom, telecommunications as well as physical infrastructure and geographic distance. We provide a current analysis of market attractiveness and opportunity for the largest set of countries indexed and ranked to date, including 24 countries not in previous OMOI studies. The validity of the OMOI is also so assessed for the first time by comparing the ranking of market opportunity to actual subsequent trade flows from the US. Furthermore, we compare the dimensions, variables, samples and results from three of Cavusgil and colleague's previous studies and the two conducted herein. The choice of sample and, to a lesser degree, weights are shown to directly affect the OMOIs and rankings. The modified OMOI is shown to be a flexible, valid and fairly stable tool for preliminary analysis of foreign market opportunity.

According to a recent and interesting revision of advances in international marketing theory and practice, the international marketing literature has grown exponentially in recent years in order to offer sufficient support to corporate and public policy makers confronting today's hostile global business conditions (Katsikeas, 2003a). In fact, some of the most relevant academic journals in this field (Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of International Marketing, International Marketing Review, International Business Review, Advances in International Marketing, among others) can be considered highly stable and mature publications, with research articles covering a wide range of topics within the international marketing domain and usually authorized by leading contributors to other high-ranking marketing journals (DuBois & Reeb, 2000; Malhotra, Wu, & Whitelock, 2005).