This paper proposes use of an assessment tool called "commodity relations," to measure national knowledge resources to help companies make better site selections for international production operations. The paper first reviews traditional measures of human capital, such as average years of education per individual and literacy rates. The proposed method measures human capital resources by measuring first-order commodity relations, in which thoughts are packages and distributed to others through various media (a book, for example) who pay money for them, and second-order commodity relations, in which an agency other than the senders and receivers of the thoughts finances communication of the thoughts. A survey could be administered that would measure how much time individuals spend on first and second order commodity relations and on noncommodified relations. Individuals in an environment of noncommodified relations would exhibit localized and strong cultural dispositions and strategic communication processes. In first-order relations, individuals would exhibit sustained attention-paying capacity, elaborate conceptualization capacity, and strong cultural dispositions. For second-order relations, individuals would exhibit variable cultural dispositions; short, shifting attention spans; and concrete, object-centered conceptual strategies. Application of this theory would indicate that a business may want to consider locations where mass media rely less on advertising and more on state sponsorship and where print media receive relatively more support from individual purchases than from advertising revenues. Contains six references. (JDD)