Pinoys improve world talent ranking

The Philippines improved its ranking in the 2019 World Talent Ranking by six notches to 49th place out of 63 countries.

In 2018, the Philippine placed 55th, 45th in 2017, 55th in 2016 and 57th in 2015.

The WTR is a publication of the International Institute for Management Development with the Asian Institute of Management R.S.N. Policy Center for Competitiveness as its Philippine partner. It is an offshoot publication of the World Competitiveness Yearbook.

Among the ASEAN countries in the report, Singapore ranked 10th followed by Malaysia at 22nd, Indonesia at 41st and Thailand at 43rd. 

Overall, the highest-ranked country was Switzerland followed by Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Luxembourg.

The WTR ranks countries based on their ability to attract, develop and retain a talented pool of human resources that businesses can employ.

The 2019 edition ranked countries using 32 criteria grouped into three factors: Investment and development, appeal and readiness. 

More than half of the criteria were based on an executive opinion survey while the remaining half were based on statistics.

The investment and development factor measures the level of investment in and development of domestic, home-grown human resources. 

The appeal factor measures the ability of a country to attract and retain high-quality human resources from abroad. 

The final factor, readiness, looks at the quality and growth of the existing talent pool in the economy.

Among the three factors, readiness has consistently been the highest-ranked, placing 26th this year or an 11-place improvement from last year’s 37th. 

The relatively higher rank of the readiness factor was mostly driven by indicators on skilled labor, language skills and share of science graduates among college degree holders. 

The next higher-ranked factor was an appeal at 31st, an improvement from last year’s 38th. The highest-ranked indicators under Appeal were cost of living and effective personal income tax rate, while the lower ranked were quality of life, justice, and brain drain.

The consistently worst-performing factor is investment and development, at 61st out of 63 countries from 62 in 2018. Its low rank was mostly driven by the pupil-teacher ratio in primary and secondary education and public expenditure on education per student.