The quality of culture and people you're dealing with has a huge multiplicative factor as well.

"I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it" is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking joke in Trenton or Newark.

Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random east asian countries where such a statement is far more believable than middle easter, african and latin american ones that are of comparable GDP.