Return to National productivity measures

Inputs – Labour – Quality

  • National economic futures depend on how well nations develop the knowledge and skills of their people:

    • China and India already produce over 5 million graduates every year

    • Shanghai topped a recent OECD test for reading, maths and science for 15-year-olds, America was 17th, Britain a lowly 25th

  • The key is to get the right mix of skills – there’s plenty of media and professional graduates nowadays but where’s the job creators, the entrepreneurs and lieutenant managers

  • To complicate things further, we are seeing a growing talent mismatch

  • Western economies have built a workforce optimised for mid-20th-century national industries, yet the jobs now being created are for 21st-century global ones

  • We need knowledge workers, not factory workers, and there just aren’t enough of the former

  • Companies across the globe consistently cite talent as their top constraint to growth

  •  According to McKinsey, in the United States, 85% of the new jobs created in the past decade required complex knowledge skills – analysing information, problem solving, rendering judgement and thinking creatively – and with good reason

  • By a number of estimates, intellectual property, brand value, process know-how and other manifestations of brain power generated more than 70% of all US market value created over the past three decades

 

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