GTCI 2017 results: ranking, scores and what changed

The 2017 edition is usually reduced to one line: Switzerland first, Singapore second¹. The rest of the table is more useful. It shows a model that was still being tuned, a field that had moved less than the headlines suggested, and a theme, talent and technology, whose predictions can now be tested against later editions¹. A newer edition exists: in 2025 Singapore ranked first among 135 countries³. Every figure below comes from the 2017 report unless a line names another source, and the text flags each number that cannot be compared with another edition. For the method behind the scores, start with what the index measures; for the ranking over time, see who led each edition.

The 2017 ranking, top 25

The full ranking is Table 1 of the 2017 report, printed on pages 13 to 15¹. It lists all 118 countries with score, rank, income group and regional rank¹. The first 25 rows are below; every country shown is in the high-income group¹.

The shape matters more than the order. Two countries sit near 74 points and the next eight sit between 69.40 and 68.01¹. The step from second place to third is the largest in the top ten; every other gap between neighbouring countries in that group is under one point¹. A one-place difference inside that group is never more than about half a point, which is weak evidence of anything.

Wealth and rank travel together: GDP per capita and GTCI scores show a high correlation¹. The 29 countries in the top quartile are shown in the darkest shade of the report’s heatmap, and the high-income group dominates them again¹.

Regional leaders and income groups

The regional leaders show where the model found strength outside Europe. In 2017 the leader of each region, with its overall rank, was¹:

At the bottom, Madagascar ranked 118th with 26.55¹. Europe supplied 16 of the top 25 countries, and Switzerland held the lead¹. Three non-European countries made the top ten, led by Singapore, the United States and Australia¹. Six more non-European countries entered the top 25: Canada, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Japan and Israel¹.

Those non-European leaders fall into two groups. One is economies with long-standing favourable immigration policies: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel¹. The other is economies with a clear focus on becoming talent hubs: Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar¹. That split is the quickest way to read the table, because the two groups pursue talent by different routes, one by being a country people migrate to and the other by building a hub on purpose.

Only three high-income countries sit outside the top 50 in 2017: Uruguay in 51st place, Kuwait in 57th and Oman in 59th¹.

How the 2017 score is built

The GTCI is an input-output model¹. Four input pillars describe what a country does to produce and acquire talent: Enable, Attract, Grow and Retain¹. Two output pillars describe the skills available as a result: Vocational and Technical Skills, called VT Skills, and Global Knowledge Skills, called GK Skills¹. The Input sub-index is the simple arithmetic average of the four input pillars, the Output sub-index the simple average of the two output pillars, and the overall GTCI the simple average of all six¹.

Mid-level skills, labelled VT Skills, describe skills with a technical or professional base acquired through vocational or professional training and experience¹. High-level skills, labelled GK Skills, concern knowledge workers in professional, managerial or leadership roles that require creativity and problem solving¹. The input pillars follow the attract-grow-retain framework that corporations use for talent management, applied here to countries¹. Terms such as VT Skills, HCLI and the JRC audit are defined in the glossary.

Where countries differ most is not where you might expect. Countries differ substantially in the Retain pillar and are far more alike in the Grow pillar, so keeping talent separates the leaders from the field more than educating it does¹. One pillar where leading countries do not clearly dominate is Vocational and Technical Skills: Germany, at 17th overall, is the leader there, and the Czech Republic, at 23rd overall, consistently ranks highly¹. Estonia, 20th overall, is a top performer in Global Knowledge Skills¹.

What changed from 2015-16

The 2017 model was refined against the 2015-16 edition, though its basic structure was unchanged¹. The number of variables rose from 61 to 65, and country coverage grew from 109 to 118 countries, representing 97.3% of the world’s GDP and about 88.7% of its population¹. A new Employability sub-pillar, under Vocational and Technical Skills, measures the extent of skill gaps and labour-market mismatches in each country¹. The sample gained nine new countries, mostly in middle- and lower-income groups¹.

Because few methodological changes were made with respect to 2015-16, rank changes between those two editions can be considered reliable¹. That makes a comparison of ranks legitimate for this pair of editions, and only this pair. Among countries in the top 25 of the 2015-16 report, twelve moved three places or more^2,1.

Show the twelve rank changes between the two editions

Country	2015-16 rank	2017 rank
Australia	13th	6th2,1
United Kingdom	7th	3rd2,1
Ireland	16th	12th2,1
United Arab Emirates	23rd	19th2,1
Luxembourg	3rd	7th2,1
Canada	9th	13th2,1
Denmark	5th	8th2,1
New Zealand	11th	14th2,1
Germany	14th	17th2,1
Austria	15th	18th2,1
Japan	19th	22nd2,1
Qatar	24th	21st2,1

The 2015-16 report had the same shape at the top: 16 of the top 25 countries were European, Switzerland held first place, and the non-European top ten were Singapore in 2nd place, the United States in 4th and Canada in 9th². The 2017 table barely changes the top-25 membership, because the group of countries that form the top 25 is virtually unchanged¹. The one headline reshuffle is Luxembourg, which slipped from 3rd to 7th but stayed 2nd on the Attract pillar¹.

Strengths and gaps of the leading countries

The country commentary adds the detail that a single rank hides. For the top six¹:

• Switzerland (1st) is strong across all six pillars, with Enable 2nd, Retain 1st and Vocational and Technical Skills 3rd¹. Attract is 5th, but the Internal Openness sub-pillar is 15th, held back by gender-equality variables¹.
• Singapore (2nd) is the top performer across Enable and Attract, with uniformly high scores in their sub-pillars; only Tolerance of immigrants shows relatively poorer performance¹.
• United Kingdom (3rd) ranks around the top ten in every pillar except Vocational and Technical Skills, where it is 33rd, against 2nd for Global Knowledge Skills¹.
• United States (4th) is 2nd in Grow, on the strength of formal education, its network of universities and access to growth opportunities; Vocational and Technical Skills, at 20th, is the dimension that needs attention¹.
• Sweden (5th) is in the top 15 on all six pillars¹.
• Australia (6th) is among the leaders in Attract, 6th, and Global Knowledge Skills, 5th¹.

Below the top six, the specialists stand out. Finland, 9th overall, is first in Formal Education and first in the Employability sub-pillar, which measures how well schooling matches the needs of the economy¹. The Netherlands, 11th overall, is the world’s top country in the Grow pillar¹. A country’s overall rank hides this: in more than 70% of the 118 countries, the overall ranking differs from every one of the six pillar rankings by 10 positions or more¹.

What the 2017 theme argued

The 2017 report took a side in the automation debate. It rejects forecasts of a jobless future and argues that people, machines and algorithms will combine, with new skills to be supplied and acquired¹. Three of its seven key messages matter most to a reader today¹.

Skills are the pressure point, not jobs. The report expects new technical and vocational skills to be needed while many unskilled jobs are automated¹. The country table backs the worry: on the Vocational and Technical Skills pillar the UK ranks 33rd and the US 20th, though both sit in the top five overall¹. A rich country can lead the index and still carry this gap.

The employee is no longer the default. The report puts nearly 30% of the population of Europe and the United States among free agents, to a greater or lesser degree¹. Its main-findings chapter states the figure without naming a survey or a year, so read it as the authors’ estimate, not a measured rate¹.

Strategy lags, and cities move first. National strategies have started to reflect the change, but too slowly¹. Nine countries are named as well positioned for technology: Switzerland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates¹. Cities and regions are developing their own strategies, which fits the city index the same report launched¹.

The other four messages say that education and employment policy must adapt, that the new talent profile mixes technical skills with social and project competence, that strong ecosystems drive change, and that work is changing in nature¹.

The report also scored how ready each region is for technology, which is a separate reading from the main table. Singapore is Asia’s clear leader; Chile leads in Latin America and Botswana in Africa¹. These are readiness findings, not positions in the main table, where Mauritius led Sub-Saharan Africa¹.

The strategy message is the one with a test attached. Eight years on, the 2025 edition adds artificial intelligence adoption, workforce resilience and employee wellbeing to its indicators, which shows how the technology question grew from automation to AI³.

The first city index

The 2017 report also launched the Global Cities Talent Competitiveness Index, called the GCTCI, in a beta version covering 46 cities¹. The rationale was that talent competitiveness has become key to cities, and cities are becoming key to talent competitiveness¹.

Show the top ten cities of the beta index

Rank	City	Score
1	Copenhagen, Denmark	74.01
2	Zurich, Switzerland	67.71
3	Helsinki, Finland	65.41
4	San Francisco, United States	63.51
5	Gothenburg, Sweden	62.61
6	Madrid, Spain	60.21
7	Paris, France	59.41
8	Los Angeles, United States	58.21
9	Eindhoven, Netherlands	57.81
10	Dublin, Ireland	57.21

Only four major cities with more than 2 million inhabitants appear in the top ten: San Francisco, Madrid, Paris and Los Angeles¹. The bottom group scores 50 or less out of 100¹. The city index was introduced as a beta, so treat its ranks as a first reading, not a settled league table¹.

How reliable the 2017 ranking is

Each edition is audited. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre audited the 2017 index, the fourth audit it had performed¹. The audit found very high statistical reliability, a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.95, and concluded that the model is robust and reliable, with a statistically coherent and balanced multi-level structure¹. For 90% of countries the published rank is within two places of the median rank across simulated alternatives¹. Confidence intervals are narrower than 4 places either way for about two-thirds of countries¹.

The practical reading: treat a 2017 rank as accurate to a few places, and do not read much into a one-place gap between countries with near-identical scores¹.

What the 2017 numbers do and do not tell you today

The 2017 scores cannot be compared with the scores of another edition, because successive editions have refined the model’s composition, indicators and data sources^3,1. The 2025 edition also relabelled the Global Knowledge Skills pillar as Generalist Adaptive Skills and counts 77 indicators across 135 countries³.

With that caution, here is where the 2017 top ten stands in the 2025 ranking^1,3. Read the table as ranks only: the model changed between the two editions, and comparisons with earlier editions should be made cautiously³.

Seven of the 2025 top ten are European³. Singapore moved up one place to first, and Switzerland dropped to second. The three Nordic countries at the foot of the 2017 top ten, Denmark, Finland and Norway, all climbed^1,3. The big falls are the United Kingdom, down nine places to 12th, and the United States, 9th in 2025 after 3rd in 2023 and 4th in 2017^3,1. Who led each edition tells the longer version.

One more thing not to confuse with this index: the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index, which scores whole economies. Its 2016-2017 report also had Switzerland first, for the eighth year running⁴.

About INSEAD and the 2017 partners

INSEAD, the business school that publishes the index, produced the 2017 edition with the Adecco Group and the Human Capital Leadership Institute, called HCLI, after the 2013, 2014 and 2015-16 editions¹. The partner line changed in later years: the 2018 edition is credited to INSEAD, the Adecco Group and Tata Communications, and the 2025 edition marks the launch of a new partnership between INSEAD and the Portulans Institute^5,3. Cite the edition you use and name the INSEAD report in full, as the 2018 edition does: INSEAD (2018), The Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2018, Fontainebleau, France⁵.

Using the 2017 data

Quote a 2017 figure with its edition year and the table it comes from. The report’s statistical annex breaks performance down by the top 15 leaders and by region and income group, and country profiles and data tables follow it¹. To get the whole 2017 ranking, download the report from the index’s own site; to see the model’s sections, read what the index measures; for the other years, read who led each edition or return to all rankings. The 2025 results are in the GTCI 2025 report³.