Chapter 10, Problem 14PS

As a member of the international strategic management team in your company, you are assigned the task of exploring potential foreign market entry. As per of your initial investigation, you want to know if there is a difference between developed markets and emerging markets with respect to the time required to start a business. You select 15 developed countries and 15 emerging countries. The time required to start a business, defined as the number of days needed to complete the procedures to legally operate a business in these countries, is stored in ForeignMarket.

a. Assuming that the population variances for developed countries and emerging countries are equal, is there evidence of a difference in the mean time required to start a business between developed countries and emerging countries? $\text{(Use}\alpha =\mathrm{0.05.})$

b. Determine the p-value in (a) and interpret its meaning?

c. In addition to equal variances, what other assumption is necessary in (a)?

d. Construct a $95\%$ confidence interval estimate of the difference between the population means of developed countries and emerging countries.