By Professor Arturo BrisArturo Bris, Chief Economist of the WCC Christos CabolisChristos Cabolis, José Caballero and Marco Pistis
The IMD World Talent Ranking will be released on 19 November (20:00 CET). It assesses how the 63 economies studied by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, attract and retain highly-skilled professionals. Cultivating a skilled and educated workforce is crucial to strengthening competitiveness and achieving long-term prosperity.
Here we look at the broad results of the 2018 IMD World Competitiveness ranking released in May of this year since data compiled during that report serves as a basis for the IMD World Talent Ranking.
As a whole, countries in the Asia & Pacific region continued to dominate IMD’s annual World Competitiveness Ranking – but not as much as they used to. The economies of Europe, Middle East & Africa are gaining on them. While the US came out on top this year, the Americas – notably Latin America – continue to decline, although there has been a slight improvement on last year’s ranking.
Of the 63 economies we examined in 2018, 31 improved their ranking, 24 went down and eight stayed the same. We scored all the countries on four main factors:
- Government efficiency, including governmental discipline with internal financing, the rule of law and the improvement of inclusive institutions
- Business efficiency, including productivity and efficiency of the private sector and ease of access to finance
- Economic performance, including international trade and international investment
- Infrastructure, including scientific infrastructure, health and environmental sustainability as well as education
Asia & Pacific does well on all of these, particularly economic performance, while its infrastructure comes in at the bottom.
The picture in Europe, the Middle East & Africa is the exact opposite: great at infrastructure, less so at economic performance. The Americas rank below the rest of the world in all these factors – although they are strongest, relatively, in business efficiency.
It’s useful to have a global view like this, but the regions each contain a wide range of countries with significant differences in their economic models (take Switzerland and Ukraine or Jordan and South Africa, for instance, countries with widely different ranks but included together in a region). The Americas include the highest ranked (the USA) and the lowest ranked (Venezuela) countries in competitiveness.
So, we’ve broken it down into sub-regions to make the ranking even more useful. The graph below shows how these sub-regions have been performing over the past six years:
