More than capital, individual skills and talents are the engines of growth and the driving forces that guide human beings towards the future. In today’s complex and dynamic global economic system of intense competition, an environment where talent can be adequately and effectively attracted, developed and retained is of utmost importance for business’s investment decisions and, by extension, for countries’ sustainable growth.

Each year since 2013, INSEAD Business School has released the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) in collaboration with the Descartes Institute for the Future (since 2021) and the Human Capital Leadership Institute (2013–2017, and again from 2022). The index aims to summarise complex and diverse concepts related to the availability of human capital and the relative strengths of nations in enabling talent to be developed, attracted, and retained, creating a single quantitative measure of talent competitiveness at the national level. In doing so, it raises conceptual and practical challenges that are discussed in an annual GTCI report. 

This chapter concerns the GTCI report for 2023, the tenth annual edition of the index. It focuses on the practical challenges related to data quality and methodological choices made in the grouping of 69 indicators into 14 sub-pillars, six pillars, two sub-indices, and an overall index for 134 countries.

 See The Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2023 full report