The List:
- Switzerland
- Singapore
- United States
- Denmark
- Netherlands
- Finland
- Norway
- Australia
- Sweden
- United Kingdom
Every country of the world is unique in its way, but what makes a country more competitive than the others are certain critical elements that can be applied everywhere whilst getting the result
According to the Institut Europeen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD), which recently revealed the ten most Talent-competitive countries.
These countries are measured by how well they produce, acquire, and retain workers among other critical criteria.
Topping the list is Switzerland, closely followed by Singapore, the U.S., Denmark, and Netherlands respectively.
Others are Finland, Norway, Australia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
History lends eloquently testimony to the fact that principles, when diligently and intelligently applied have the capacity of producing the same effect anywhere.
At TechEconomy, we believe that the understanding of this simple, yet embedded with profound lessons will trigger both personal and national transformation.
Innovations
The first on the list is Innovation. Innovation is the process of bringing about ideas, methods, products, services, or solutions that have a significant positive impact and value. It involves transforming creative concepts into tangible outcomes that improve efficiency and effectiveness or address unmet needs.
For instance, one of the aforementioned countries, Switzerland compensates for its small size and high costs with a high-performing education system, significant investment in R&D, and an ecosystem conducive to the emergence of start-ups.
Some years ago, Google chose to set up its largest research and development (R&D) center outside the United States in Zurich, where the group employs almost 5,000 people.
Its competitiveness is far from limited to its abnormally large banking sector (which accounts for 10% of gross domestic product, GDP) or its reputation as a tax haven (the nation devotes 3.2% of its GDP to R&D every year, according to the World Bank).
That is more than the European average (2.15%) and that of France (2.35%). Industry accounts for 25% of GDP, twice that of France. It is the country that files the most patents per million inhabitants, 1,031 in 2022, compared with 482 in Sweden, 161 in France and 142 in the US, according to the European Patent Office.
It has topped the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index for the past 12 years, and 14 of its companies – including Roche, Novartis, STMicroelectronics, and Givaudan – are among the top 500 groups investing the most in research, according to the consulting firm EY.
To this picture, one could add an unemployment rate of just 3.7% and a high trade surplus of 5% of GDP.
What else? Its strong export performance is due as much to the major groups as to our web of SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises], which are very strong in cutting-edge fields,”
Strong Pension
A pension system is a long-term commitment. Inspiring trust in such a system requires a regulatory system also characterized by long-term commitment and stability.
The pension scheme Must be financially stable and rests on a broad parliamentary majority. Thus favorable realistic conditions exist for maintaining the system in all its essentials over a number of decades.
Finland Exemplifies this, It is in the top five in international pension comparison – ranked the most transparent and reliable pension system. Finland received the highest index value in the sub-index of integrity (reliable and transparent governance) for the ninth time in a row.
The Finnish pension system ranked fifth in the international Global Pension Index comparison.
It also benefited from the change in the comparison calculation method. Finland received the highest index value in the sub-index of integrity (reliable and transparent governance) for the ninth time in a row.
On the flip of the coin, the Administration of Pension in Nigeria has experienced inconsistency in policies due to its many challenges since inception- delay in payment of pensions and gratuities to deserving retirees in Nigeria fueled by lack of accountability, poor leadership, embezzlement of the pension fund, inaccurate pensioners records among others.
According to the (Q2, 2022) data from the National Pension Commission (PenCom), Nigeria’s pension industry’s regulator, about 10 million people have pension accounts.
This figure is about 15-17% of the labor force, a far cry from PenCom’s agenda set in 2007, to cover at least 30% of the working population with pension plans by 2024.
In the United States, more than half of the working-age population have some form of retirement plan. That number is over 70% in the United Kingdom.
Skills
Another indispensable takeaway lesson from this selected country is Skill. Skill development is the process of improving specific skills to be more efficient and effective when a task is performed. Presently, there are huge gaps in basic literacy and numeracy of working-age populations,
Not less than 750 million people aged 15+ (or 18 percent of the global population) report being unable to read and write, with estimates being nearly twice as large if literacy is measured through direct assessments.
While large-scale international assessments of adult skills generally point to skills mismatches as well as large variations in the returns to education across fields of study, institutions, and population groups.
Megatrends such as automation, action against climate change, the digitalization of products and services, and a shrinking and aging labour force, will transform over 1.1 billion jobs in the next decade.
Furthermore, about 450 million youth (7 out of 10) are economically disengaged, due to a lack of adequate skills to succeed in the labor market.
Over 2.1 billion adults need remedial education for basic literacy, numeracy, and socio-emotional skills.
It will interest you to also know that about 23 percent of firms cite workforce skills as a significant constraint to their operations. In some African and Latin American countries, this share rises to 40–60 percent.
That is, most African and most South Asian countries do not have data on workforce skills, sad!!!. The global economy could gain an estimated US$6.5 trillion in the next seven years by closing workers’ skills gaps, representing 5-6 percent of their GDP.
Nonetheless, most countries invest less than 0.5 percent of the global gross domestic product in adult lifelong learning.
But to succeed in the 21st-century labor market, one needs a comprehensive skill set composed of Foundational and higher-order skills, Literacy and numeracy as well as problem-solving, and communication.
Informational analysis skills, which are cognitive skills. Socio-emotional skills, which describe the ability to manage relationships, emotions, and attitudes.
These skills include being able to navigate interpersonal and social situations effectively, as well as leadership, teamwork, self-control, and grit.
There are also Specialized skills, which refer to the acquired knowledge, expertise, and interactions needed to perform a specific task, including the mastery of required materials, tools, or technologies. Specialized technical and cognitive skills as well as entrepreneurship skills are included in this category.
Ultimately, Digital skills, which are cross-cutting and draw on all of the above skills, describe the ability to access, manage, understand, integrate, communicate, evaluate, and create information safely and appropriately.
According to Statista, the U.S. seasonally adjusted the monthly number of employees from 2021-2023. In December 2023, about 161.18 million people were employed in the United States.
The labour force participation rate is pegged at 62.5 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.1 percent, both decreased by 0.3 percent. This already indicates the importance of skills in its many varieties.
The Economy
Central and pivotal to all that has been said is the Economy. The Economy simply defined, is the state of a country or region in terms of the production of goods and services and the supply of money. It set the pace for politics.
The United Kingdom London for instance, is the second-largest financial centre in the world. While Edinburgh was ranked 17th in the world, and 6th in Europe for its financial services industry in 2021.
The United Kingdom’s technology sector is valued at US$1 trillion, third behind the United States and China.
The aerospace industry in the United Kingdom is the second-largest national aerospace industry. Its pharmaceutical industry, the tenth-largest in the world, plays an important role in the economy.
Again, of the world’s 500 largest companies, 18 are headquartered in the UK. The economy is boosted by North Sea oil and gas production; its reserves were estimated at 2.8 billion barrels in 2016, although it has been a net importer of oil since 2005.
There are significant regional variations in prosperity, with South East England and North East Scotland being the richest areas per capita.
The size of London’s economy makes it the wealthiest city by GDP per capita in Europe.
On the contrary, most other countries of the Southern sphere are performing abysmally low. A look into the official estimate of Ghana’s GDP reads $187 billion at the end of 2023 in purchasing power parity terms.
While is placed side by side with $3.168 trillion the official estimate for the United Kingdom’s GDP, at the end of 2023 in purchasing power parity terms.
The result of course speaks for itself, but who will go for a less developed country, at the expense of the developed ones? No one I guess.
Social Protection
Last, but not the list, is Social Protection. Social protection is defined as the set of policies and programs designed to reduce poverty and vulnerability by promoting efficient labour markets, diminishing people’s exposure to risks, and enhancing their capacity to protect themselves against hazards and interruption/loss of income.
According to the word bank, not less than 55 percent of the world’s population has no access to social protection at all, at least 50 percent does not have full coverage of essential health services, and progress in extending coverage is slow.
These figures reflect widespread human suffering as workers and their families excluded from social and health protection cannot access health care when needed, and lack basic income security, in cases such as unemployment or other shocks to livelihoods, sickness, maternity, disability, or old-age, as has been painfully exposed by the COVID-19 crisis
The pandemic proved to be a major catalyst for increasing the global focus on social protection. Over the course of 2020-2021, countries across the globe implemented close to 4,000 social protection measures to respond to its economic impact. Cash transfers alone reached around 1.4 billion people or one out of six people in the world.
But as of March 2023, The world Bank, provides $26 billion in financing through our social protection and jobs programs, across regions and income levels, including $16.4 billion through IDA, our fund for the poorest.
As described in the 2022 Social Protection and Jobs Compass, countries need to build Universal Social Protection systems.
Shocks are likely to become more prevalent as longer-term global trends like the evolving nature of work, demographic change, climate change, and conflict and fragility reshape economies and societies.
The Netherlands, the country listed above, drives this point home. The Netherlands has one of the most comprehensive social security systems in Europe. The national insurance scheme provides nationwide government support with benefits such as old-age pension (AOW), child benefit (AKW), survivor benefit (AWW), and the long-term care act (WIz).
In comparative terms, the Social Protection Policy for Nigeria, which is an umbrella policy framework that incorporates related social agenda paradigms intended to reduce poverty and provide a life of dignity for all citizens has been reeked with Policy inconsistency, lack of funding, low coverage, Poorly design social protection schemes, Corruption among others.
Some weeks ago, Nigeria’s president suspended the country’s minister of humanitarian affairs and poverty alleviation over the use of a private bank account for ministry financial transactions in the government’s social welfare program.
Betta Edu was suspended with immediate effect while Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency carries out a “thorough investigation” of all ministry financial transactions, It said the investigation would extend to the entire framework of Nigeria’s social investment programs.
The same thing applied to the former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar-Farouq, who was quizzed over allegations of corruption in the handling of N37.1 billion social intervention funds during her tenure.
Then one begins to “wonder like wander” where lies the Economic competitiveness of Nigeria, and other African countries with such obnoxious gait.
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