Intelligence Capital Index

Intelligence Capital Index The key qualities of a nation that will spur innovation and propel the knowledge economy are smarts and creativity. Underpinning these is the “intelligence capital” of a country, a measure of its knowledge capability, i.e. its stock of intellectual know-how along with its ability to develop and attract talent. The Intelligence Capital Index (ICI) is a way to measure the ability of countries to capitalise on the knowledge economy by assessing their environments for education, creativity and talent attraction. It is based on five aspects of knowledge acquisition/production: (1) Quantity of education; (2) Quality of education; (3) Average educational skills; (4) Elite educational skills; (5) Creativity and complexity; and (5) Attractiveness and openness to talent. Underlying these are 24 indicators that span the life cycle of talent -- from childhood through tertiary education and then in the marketplace. Below are the ten countries with the best knowledge capital outcomes: USA (74.883) UK (64.192) Germany (64.179) Australia (63.960) Singapore (63.599) Sweden (61.582) Switzerland (61.574) Canada (61.149) Finland (60.445) Denmark (60.252) A synopsis of the ICI can found below: Full results (128 countries are assessed) including methodology and indicators can be found here.

Gender Progress Index

Gender Progress Index Mao Zedong once remarked that “women hold up half the sky.” Yet in many countries today women are not fulfilling their potential due to cultural, legal and social impediments. But just as society loses when women fall short, so too when men are stifled. Society progresses when all its members are able to achieve more. The Gender Progress Index (GPI) is a measure of female-male progress that considers both the level of progress as well as the gap between the two. Levels are important as a country where people are equally under-utilised is not ideal. The gap is important as it indicates the internal gender dynamics within a country. The GPI also takes an agnostic view on female-male outcomes: male under-performance of female outcomes is equal to the inverse. To capture both the significance of levels and ratios into an index a measure can be defined using both level and ratio as inputs: y = f (L,R). This can be done using a Cobb-Douglas utility function with constant returns to scale: y = (L^0.5)*(R^0.5) where L is the unit-free score derived from the level values (a distance-to-frontier function) and R is the ratio of female-to-male or male-to-female value of the…

MES: Immigrating into the workforce

The 15th Munich Economic Summit (Jun 30-Jul 1, 2016) addressed the migrant crisis under the theme of "Migration: opportunity or challenge?" The topic of one of the summit's breakout sessions was "immigrating into the workforce", an assessment of the challenges that Germany (and Europe) will face in absorbing the migrants into the labour market. I shared a personal essay on my own migrant experience in Germany to help initiate the discussion: "Immigrating into the workforce." It will be a difficult challenge for Germany and Europe to integrate the recent wave of migrants given the huge gulf (social, cultural, cognitive, etc.) between them and modern, secular Europe. History has also shown that the migrants groups currently entering Europe have a checkered history of integration. The discussion note can be found here.

Power Language Index

Power Language Index There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, but some 2,000 of them count fewer than a thousand speakers. Moreover, just 15 of them account for half of the languages spoken in the world. Which are the world's most influential languages? The Power Language Index is a measure of a language's efficacy by measuring its influence in 5 domains ("opportunities"): (1) geography, (2) economy, (3) communication, (4) knowledge & media, and (5) diplomacy. Within each of these opportunities is a set of indicators, totalling 20 in entirety for the index. The index is a cardinal measure with a range [0,1]. Below are the ten most powerful languages: English (0.889) Mandarin Chinese (0.411) French (0.337) Spanish (0.329) Arabic (0.273) Russian (0.244) German (0.191) Japanese (0.133) Portuguese (0.119) Hindi (0.117) English is by far the most powerful language, and is over twice as strong as its closest rival (Mandarin Chinese) and eight times as effective as the tenth most dominant language (Hindi).There are many interesting consequences and insights from the index. For example, in spite of being the second largest contributor to both the IMF and UN budgets, Japanese are highly under-represented in senior positions in either institution, and Japanese…

Canada’s governing class: Who rules the country?

This working paper examines the socio-economic composition of Canada's Parliament. Beyond race/ethnicity and gender, we also examine the following stratifications of Canada's federal politicians: Age Education level and field of study Language National origin / immigrant status Profession (prior to being a federal politician) Religion Post secondary institution attended Tenure (as a politician) The working paper can be found here.