IMD World Talent Ranking 2022

Figure 4: “Brain drain does not hinder competitiveness” (score 0-10) in 2019 – 2022. Source: IMD (2022)

New Zealand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Africa and Venezuela display the largest declines.

Improvements in the brain drain and the brain gain indicators are, however, key to explaining the rise in Appeal scores for the Czech Republic, Croatia and the Slovak Republic. All of them show clear progress in both dimensions between 2019 and 2022. Elsewhere, brain drain and brain gain are key drivers of declines in the Appeal variable for New Zealand and the UAE, which experienced a marked increase in brain drain concerns as well as a lesser one in attracting foreign highly skilled professionals. Hong Kong exhibits major difficulties in both tackling brain drain and supporting brain gain. Other economies at the top the WTR 2022, such as Denmark, Canada and the US have improved their capacity to retain local, homegrown talent but have lost some ground in attracting new, foreign highly skilled professionals. In sum, the pandemic has strongly impacted the landscape of talent mobility. It had a direct impact on the capacity of most of the economies under study to retain local, highly skilled personnel and to attract foreign talent, affecting in turn their Appeal levels. The talent hubs landscape is therefore bound to change.

While COVID-19 represents the common thread behind these changes, each economy’s evolution is affected by its locally specific socio-economic factors. In this sense, Figures 4 and 5 add color to the overall picture given by Figure 3 . They follow the same structure of Figure 4 , and they exhibit the evolution of “brain drain” and “brain gain” indicators respectively. The “brain drain” indicator assesses whether the degree of local, homegrown talent emigration from one economy to another represents a problem for the country’s competitiveness (with zero indicating a serious brain drain issue for the economy and ten signifying an absence of issues created by brain drain). The “brain gain” indicator assesses the general level of attractiveness of a country for foreign highly skilled workers, with zero signifying low attractiveness and 10 high attractiveness. A first observation is that the increase in Appeal that Saudi Arabia has experienced is not linked to brain drain. Other factors such as a decrease in the cost of living, an increase in quality-of-life scores and ambitious invest ment plans seemed to have played a bigger role in lifting Saudi Arabia’s Appeal score.

19