The 2006 Economic and Product Market Databook for Belmopan, Belize

by Philip M. Parker

In performing various economic analyses for its clients, I have occasionally been asked to investigate the market potential for various products and services in Belize. The purpose of this study is to understand the density of demand within Belize and the extent to which Belmopan might be used as a point of distribution within Latin America. From an economic perspective, however, Belmopan does not represent a population within rigid geographical boundaries, rather, it represents an area of dominant influence over markets in adjacent areas. This influence varies from one industry to another, but also from one period of time to another. In what follows, I summarize the economic potential for Belmopan over the next five years for hundreds of industries, categories and products. The goal of this report is to report the real economic potential, or what an economist calls the latent demand, represented by Belmopan when defined as an area of dominant influence. The reader needs to realize that latent demand may or may not represent real sales. For many items, latent demand is clearly observable in sales, as in the case for food or housing items. Consider, however, the category "satellite launch vehicles". Clearly, there are no launch pads in Belmopan used by the space industry to launch satellites. However, the core benefit of the vehicles (e.g. telecommunications, etc.) is "consumed" by the area served by Belmopan. Without Belmopan, in other words, the market for satellite launch vehicles would be lower for the population in Belize, Latin America, or the world in general. One needs to allocate, therefore, a portion of the worldwide economic demand for launch vehicles to both Latin America and Belmopan. The data presented are the result of various spatial econometric and time-series forecasting models which, for each category presented, are applied to forecast and allocate demand across all countries of the world and major distribution centers or centers of dominant influence within each country. This is accomplished knowing that economic fundamentals (e.g. income) generally vary from one city to another within a given country over time. In this report, I report the allocation for each category for Belmopan as an area of dominant influence in Belize and, potentially, Latin America. Important Caveat. Category definitions may overlap. The sum of multiple categories, therefore, may double count.

618 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2006

About the author

Philip M. Parker holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches. At Amazon.com, Parker is listed as the author of 85,000 books that his program created and overall he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles. All books are self-published paperbacks and are printed only when an order arrives. Ninety-five percent of the ordered books are sent out electronically.

Parker has produced a series of cross-language dictionaries and thesauri, e.g. Webster's Quechua - English Thesaurus Dictionary. Parker's methods of publishing dictionaries are considered unethical by many professional linguists and contain large amounts of error. Of particular concern is the fact that he fails to either acknowledge or reference his sources and leaves the impression that he has done the linguistic work to amass the data

Parker's programs can also produce rudimentary poetry as well as scripts for animated game shows intended to teach English to non-native speakers and available on YouTube. He plans to extend the programs to produce romance novels.