What is the Global Talent Competitiveness Index?

What the index measures

Talent competitiveness, in the 2025 edition’s definition, is the set of policies and practices that let a country develop, attract and empower the human capital that drives productivity and prosperity¹. The unit is the country, and each one is scored on what it does to produce and acquire talent and on the skills that result¹. At the core is a six-pillar input-output framework: the ability to attract, grow and retain human capital within an enabling context, and to turn that effort into measurable talent outcomes⁵.

The attract-grow-retain triple comes from business: the input pillars are inspired by the framework corporations use to steer talent management².

How the model is built

Four input pillars describe what countries do. Two output pillars describe the skills they end up with. The overall index is the product of both sides¹.

The sixth pillar changed name in 2025. What earlier editions called Global Knowledge Skills, or GK Skills, is now Generalist Adaptive Skills¹. The 2017 definition, high-level skills of knowledge workers in professional, managerial or leadership roles that require creativity and problem solving, is the older wording². Check which label an edition uses before you compare pillar names across years.

Attract looks inward as well as outward. Internal attraction means removing barriers for groups such as people from underprivileged backgrounds, women and older people², so the pillar can reward a country for equality at home as well as for openness to foreigners.

Under the pillars sit sub-pillars and variables. The 2017 model had 65 variables in 14 sub-pillars²; the 2025 model has 77 indicators covering 135 countries, over 97% of global GDP and 93% of the world’s population¹. The first edition, in 2013, used 48 indicators on 103 countries³.

How a score is made

Every indicator is rescaled to a 0 to 100 range with the min-max method¹. The formula is 100 x (value - min) / (max - min)¹.

Worked example (our arithmetic). An invented indicator with a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 120¹; not a figure from any report:

The lowest value maps to 0 and the highest to 100. One exception: survey-based and index-based series keep their original range, 1 to 7 for the Forum’s executive survey¹.

Pillar scores are then averaged with no weighting. Four input pillars give the Input sub-index, two output pillars give the Output sub-index, and the overall GTCI is the plain mean of all six². Equal weights are a modelling choice, not a finding: each pillar carries exactly one sixth of the overall score, however much a reader cares about it².

Two things follow for anyone quoting a result. A country’s overall rank often sits far from its rank on a single pillar: in 2025, between 33% and 60% of countries rank differently overall than on each of the six pillars¹, and in 2017 more than 70% of the 118 countries differed from every pillar ranking by 10 positions or more². And a score belongs to its edition. Each one refines the model’s composition, indicators and data sources¹, so a 2025 score and a 2017 score sit on different scales. The 2017 results show the older scale, and the story of the top spot shows why comparing across them misleads.

Rich countries lead. The 2017 report describes a high correlation between GDP per capita and GTCI scores but prints no coefficient², so the better question is who beats their income.

Who publishes it

INSEAD, the business school, publishes the index, and its partners have changed over time^1,2. The 2025 edition launched a new partnership with the Portulans Institute and is the eleventh edition¹.

The 2023 edition, the tenth anniversary, recalled the start: a conversation between Bruno Lanvin, then executive director of eLab at INSEAD, and the Singapore Minister of Manpower at the launch of the Global Innovation Index 2012⁴. The first edition followed a year later⁴. The Human Capital Leadership Institute in Singapore supplied the initial impetus, then employers stepped up with support from Adecco, TCS and Google, and Paul Evans is credited as founding academic director⁴.

One discrepancy to know about: the Adecco Group’s page on the 2020 edition says the index launched in 2014, while the 2013 report and the 2023 preface give 2013^6,3,4. We follow the reports.

The editions and their themes

The input-output model has stayed conceptually stable while each edition’s theme changes¹. Themes are where most of the commentary sits.

The model grew along with the themes. The 2018 edition raised the variable count from 65 to 68¹⁰. The 2020 edition added a Technology adoption component and went from 68 to 70 indicators⁶. The 2025 edition added AI adoption, workforce resilience and employee wellbeing¹. Coverage went from 103 countries in 2013 to 135 in 2025^3,1.

The 2025 top ten

Singapore is first, then Switzerland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden; the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, the United States and Australia complete the ten, seven of them European¹. The full table, with scores and pillar leaders, sits on the results pages, and who led each edition tells how the order got here.

How reliable it is

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre audits each edition independently; the 2025 audit was its eleventh assessment of the index and found the framework robust and reliable, with a statistically coherent and balanced multi-level structure¹. The 2017 audit measured a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.95, a gauge of internal consistency².

An audit checks that the arithmetic is sound. It cannot say whether 77 indicators capture everything about talent¹, so read the ranking as a structured summary and not a verdict on any country’s workforce.

What the GTCI is not

It is not the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness index, though the two are often mixed up. That index has 12 pillars, from institutions to innovation capability, and 103 indicators in its 2019 edition; Singapore scored 84.8 out of 100 there, closest to the frontier⁷. The GTCI looks at one slice of a country, talent, through six pillars.

Nor is it the IMD World Talent Ranking, which covers 69 economies using 31 pieces of data plus thousands of executive survey answers⁸. IMD asks about investment in home-grown talent, how far an economy appeals to local and overseas talent, and the skills in the pool⁸, a three-part structure that echoes the GTCI’s develop, attract and retain.

Glossary

VT Skills

Vocational and Technical Skills, the output pillar for mid-level skills gained through vocational or professional training and experience².

GK Skills, GA Skills

The output pillar for high-level knowledge-worker skills: GK (Global Knowledge) in 2017, renamed GA (Generalist Adaptive) in 2025^1,2.

HCLI

The Human Capital Leadership Institute in Singapore, whose support started the index⁴.

JRC

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre, which audits every edition independently¹.

Cronbach's alpha

A statistical measure of internal consistency; the 2017 audit gave the index 0.95².

Min-max

The rescaling that turns each indicator into a 0 to 100 value, as worked above¹.

How to cite it

Name the edition and the number of countries with every rank. Quote the score only next to the same edition’s other scores. The pillars and the score arithmetic are the two sections above, and the method hub lists every page on how the index works; the ranking itself is on the 2017 results and in the story of the top spot. The reports are free: the 2025 report, the 2017 report and the 2013 report are published as PDFs.