Shaping a comprehensive government-supported country brand program

Abstract

Country brand support programs are instruments of open protectionism, which results from unilateral sanctions by foreign countries or acts as a mechanism for direct government support of national producers, creating positive perception by customers abroad and promoting goods and services to foreign markets. However, the long-term preservation of protectionist measures in the national economy leads to the loss of competitiveness by producers and the national economy as a whole. Therefore, it becomes relevant to study the programs of several states in the context of the development of national production and exports, and search for approaches to shaping a comprehensive program of government support for the country brands, which correspond to the main fair competition features in the global economy based on agreements within the WTO. This study is aimed at identifying the feasibility of transforming the “Made in Russia” initiative into a comprehensive country brand government support program. The methodological tools of the studied problem are based on expert and mutual assessments, the Delphi method, mathematical statistics, and graphical modeling. The expert assessment method was used to substantiate the expediency of protectionism for domestic producers to preserve quality and environmental friendliness of export-oriented products in the current conditions that contribute to cultivating the country’s positive image. A cause-and-effect diagram (the so-called Fishbone Diagram) developed on the basis of the K. Ishikawa model made it possible to identify the main causes and conditions for shaping a comprehensive program for the country brand government support.