KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has been ranked 37th out of 103 countries on graduate business school INSEAD’s first edition of the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI). The index seeks to measure a nation’s competitiveness based on the quality of talent it can produce, attract and retain, INSEAD said in a press release yesterday. The GTCI model covered 103 countries which represented 86.3% of the world’s population and 96.7% of the world’s GDP. It was based on research carried out in partnership with the Human Capital Leadership Institute of Singapore and human resource solutions provider Adecco Group, based in Zurich, Switzerland. Switzerland emerged at the top of the index, followed by Singapore and Denmark in second and third places respectively. Malaysia is preceded by Spain and Italy and followed by Portugal and Lithuania. Singapore is the only Asian country that made it to the top 20 while other developed Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and China were ranked 21st, 28th and 47th respectively. INSEAD’s study showed that out of the six pillars used as measurements in the GTCI framework — Enablers, Attract, Grow, Retain, Labour, and Vocational Skills (LV) and Global Knowledge Skills (GK) — Malaysia performed better in the Grow category, whereby the country appeared to be reaping the rewards of strong education policies gradually implemented over the last 10 years. According to the study, Malaysia’s relative strengths lies in the relationship between pay and productivity, extent of staff training, venture capital availability, extent of effect of taxation, ease of doing business, state of cluster development, labour market flexibility and qualified labour inflows. On the other hand, Malaysia’s position in the ranking was weakened by its low score on tolerance to immigrants and a rather low performance in gender mobility in terms of women professionals as well as women parliamentarians. Bruno Lanvin, executive director for Global Indices at INSEAD, said talent competitiveness provides a contrasted vision of Asia. “Singapore is far ahead of everyone else, but some countries like Malaysia show that you do not need to be rich to be talent competitive,” he explained. Singapore received second ranking due to the ease of doing business there and its strong and stable political setting, among other factors. Paul Evans, emeritus professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD and also co-editor of the report, said there are differences among the 103 countries covered by the study. He found that while rich countries need more global knowledge skills to foster innovation and a job-rich recovery, developing countries still need the labour and vocational skills required to build infrastructure, health and education systems. “But all of them have to build better environments to grow, attract and retain the skills and talents they need,” he noted. The purpose of the GTCI is to provide a neutral, global and respected index that would enable private and public players to assess the effectiveness of talent-related policies and practices. This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on November 27, 2013.