IMD business school’s World Competitiveness Center releases 2nd annual World Talent Report. Singapore has supplanted Malaysia as the Southeast Asian economy best equipped to develop, attract and retain talent.The latest World Talent Report from leading global business school IMD places Singapore 10th in a ranking of countries’ ability to meet corporate needs.
By contrast, Malaysia, which took fifth position last year, has fallen out of the top 10 after suffering a decline in a number of relevant performance indicators.The report represents an annual assessment of how effectively nations are able to nurture and sustain talent for the businesses operating within their economies.Professor Arturo Bris, Director of IMD’s World Competitiveness Center, which carried out the study, said: “The key attribute among all the countries that rank highly is agility.
“This is shown in their capacity to adopt and shape policies that preserve their talent pipeline, which in turn makes them what we describe as ‘talent-competitive’.“Malaysia has clearly lost has some of that agility, and its fall has actually been quite sudden and significant. Needless to say, this is a trend it would do well to reverse.”Malaysia enjoyed steady improvement until 2014, rising from 20th to fifth, before experiencing a fall in “almost all talent indicators” during the last year of the study period.Meanwhile, Singapore climbed as high as second overall in 2008, slipped back, finished in the mid-teens in 2013 and 2014 and then recovered to claim 10th spot.
Other Southeast Asian economies enjoyed mixed fortunes, with China Hong Kong rising from 21st last year to 12th this year and Indonesia plunging from 25th to 41st.Several major economies also fared disappointingly, with the US languishing in 14th place, the UK 21st, France 27th and mainland China way down in 40th spot.Switzerland topped the rankings – as it did last year – followed by Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Canada and Belgium.The rankings are based on 20 years’ worth of competitiveness-related data including an in-depth survey of over 4,000 executives in the 61 countries covered by the study.
The research focuses on three main categories – investment/development, appeal and readiness – which in turn are derived from a much broader range of factors including education, apprenticeship, employee training, brain-drain, cost of living, worker motivation, quality of life, language skills, remuneration and tax rates.The main categories are aggregated into a yearly overall ranking. In addition, each country’s evolution in the various aspects is assessed over the course of a decade – in this instance from 2005 to 2015 – to identify the most talent-competitive countries.
