I am surprised recently by the number of prospects and clients that I have run into that have or are planning their own software development operation in another country. The rule of thumb is don’t do it unless you are ready to commit to a long-term presence in your selected offshore location, and you plan on hiring at least 50 employees.

The people I met are planning to hire 20 people in Bulgaria, or have only 6 in India.  Sometimes a small “friends and family” subsidiary can work well when one of your valuable and trusted employees returns to his home country.

But also consider the information and statistics in the recently published report from the World Bank entitled “Doing Business 2008″. The full 180-page report is available on Amazon and the World Bank website. A free 9-page overview is available on the Doing Business website.

A very cool interactive Doing Business Map that lets you click on a country to display its statistics for ease or difficulty of doing business there. These are the results of a study carried out by the World Bank of 178 countries and their laws regulations regarding business.

Statistics like the number of weeks of salary paid to terminated employees (56 weeks in India and 87 weeks in Vietnam) may give you cause for concern.

I first read about this report in an article by Andres Oppenheimer, Latin America correspondent from the Miami Herald and republished in the San Jose Mercury News. His surprising conclusion was that it is easier to do business in China, Vietnam and Eastern Europe than it is in Latin America.

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