Full list of World Digital Competitiveness Ranking is on pages 48-49 of this PDF:
https://imd.widen.net/s/xvhldkrrkw/20241111-wcc-digital-repo...
via: https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center...
Direct link to the PDF (instead of having to go via some web-based PDF viewer):
https://imd.widen.net/content/q3p8lowz7b/original/20241111-W...
Germany that high? Do they count fax machines as digital?
As a German, I think Estonia has to be before us with a huge lead. Their digital infrastructure is the wet dream of our bureaucratic apparatus.
I don't think the IMD is aware of just how crappy digital processes are in Germany.
A legal process that is digital literally means that you fill out an online form so they can send you the printed out paper form via snail mail and you have to redundantly fill that out again, saving overall exactly 0 seconds with the initial digital website. Not kidding.
Look where IMD is located....There is a reason why Switzerland ranks up there.
> Do they count fax machines as digital?
I'm surprised by the number of medical practices in Australia that still use fax machines for sending reports and referrals.
Ordinary email is widely not viewed as sufficiently secure to use for sending confidential patient health data (although I've seen a minority use it for that purpose anyway). There is a secure digital messaging system supposed to replace fax machines, HealthLink, which some practices use. But it is owned by a private company and costs extra $$$, and a lot of practices decide they don't want to pay it. So fax machines survive. Now running over VoIP (actually FoIP) – Australia has turned off its POTS telephone system.
Country credit rating #1
Robots in education and R&D #2
E-participation #3
Graduates in Science #4
Computer science education index #4I tried looking at the methodology document, but it just seems like pseudo-technical double speak that doesn't actually explain what they're measuring. Is this study actually known to be valuable, or is this just click-bait for middle managers?
https://libraries.emory.edu/sites/default/files/migrated-doc...
> Is this study actually known to be valuable, or is this just click-bait for middle managers
It's basically marketing for IMD - a degree mill business school in Switzerland.
They make a lot of this content due to close proximity to think tanks in Lausanne and Zurich.
Some of their metric are dubios (number of published AI articles - wtf?) and the weighting seems arbitrary.
So like every ranking ever
Haha, I love the typesetting in particular
IMD study, what else do you expect?
Agreeing with other comments. I wouldn't take this too seriously.
Judging by the Korean score. Korea's English proficiency is nowhere near that high. Among university age reading and listening is good. But Koreans even when they 'know' English can't string a sentence together. (Source: live here)
I'm surprised that Kenya is not in the list.
Very high English proficiency and a large industry that does assignments for American students
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Probably the Kenyans themselves (as a Kenyan born and raised),yes Chinese migrants are there but there number are negligible. Most of them are contractors who build infrastructure. Also anecdotal evidence,i know a couple of people work online
> Probably the chinese immigrants and not the kenyans themselves
Absolutely not.
Kenya's ICT industry is very robust and home grown. Kenyan companies like M-Pesa and Safaricom are fairly competitive, and I think Kenya's tech industry is at the same position India's was in the 2000s and is set to take off. In fact, nowadays Kenyan ICT companies have begun expanding the tech industry in Uganda and Tanzania.
Also, Chinese investment in Kenya is low. Indian investment tends to be much more prominent. Heck, President Ruto's campaign advisory team was from the same company the BJP uses [0], and the second largest source of FDI in Kenya after the UK is India's Marutius backdoor [1].
You're more likely to see Chinese investment in Ethiopia or DRC, not really Anglophone East Africa where Indian, South African, a d UAE firms/investors can outcompete Chinese investors due to stronger business (and family) connections.
Surprisingly, in Lusaphone countries like Angola and Mozambique, Vietnamese players like Viettel have a strong presence in the ICT industry, which I think might be due to Military support from their revolutionary era (Viettel is owned by the VPA).
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Also, this ranking is from IMD - an unaccredited degree mill posing as a business school in Lausanne that coasts off it's reputation from when it was an executive training program for Nestle before the 1990s.
Switzerland has a big issue with unaccredited business schools.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63397760
[1] - https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/kenya/in...
And that's how you propose the wrong answer and get the right one ;-)
And they are 1st in Japanese Skills !
Wow what an upset! I wanted Korea to win.
The fact that we have an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on really highlights the bias of the people who organize this data.
Which bias is that? English proficiency is extremely relevant to a country’s ongoing development for all sorts of reasons I would think are obvious.
Read the report. It’s really well put together. https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi...
When I look at the ranking on p. 4, English does not appear to be very relevant. Switzerland is #31, but Greece #8. Romania is #12 just two places behind Germany #10. Italy is #46, France #49. India #69, China #91, Japan #92, Thailand #106.
The diagrams on p. 13 all have correlation coefficients (r values) between 0.56 and 0.61, which signify only moderate associations. And the causality from language to success behind such associations is very likely even weaker. In other words, people from many countries are good at English because their country is economically advanced (and not the other way round).
I think that on an individual level, it is very desirable to be able to at least read English very well because it opens up so many resources on the Internet. However, when it comes to economic impact, the ranking seems to suggest an extremely tenuous link at best. In addition, foreign language skills are likely to become even less relevant in the future as translation software improves.
This just seems like analyzing something until you’ve turned yourself around. By “extremely relevant” I don’t mean r=1. I just mean it matters.
Imagine doing that same analysis on a report of a country’s metal deposits. I’m sure it would be all over the place. But saying this topic isn’t worth writing ten words about would be silly.
As I explained it: the data indicates that it does not matter much, if at all. It just is not "extremely relevant".
This does not mean that it might not be extremely relevant in a certain subdomain, such as academics. But generally? No.
English fluency matters less for Japan, for what it’s worth. They have their own Japanese versions of everything.
They don't have their own japanese versions for a lot of stuff?
They still use the same software as the west (iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome, ...).
Most of these cornerstones of modern Software maintain Japanese, Chinese and Korean documentation, but there is no way those docs are as good as the English ones.
I wasn’t talking about translated docs.
There are whole stacks of software used in Japan which are not used anywhere else. Sometimes it predates western adoption of similar ideas (like the media phones Japan had years before the iPhone, which to some degree Apple was copying), sometimes it Japan that adopts something western and then forks it. It is a recognized and studied phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
There is some advantage to speaking English as you then get access to two separate development cultures and can pick the best of each for the job. But it is not a hard requirement like it is for the rest of the world. Only a small minority of engineers work on the latest western technology stacks like we do.
The report in question is the "world digital competitiveness ranking". I think it's safe to say that you can't get very high on that list without having very good English skills.
In that way I would say English fluency very much matters for Japan if they want to stay relevant with the rest of the world.
Correlation is not causation, and if you look at most of the graphs correlating English proficiency to outcomes, the correlation coefficient is around 0.55-0.65, which aren't great correlations. Paying closer attention, it seems that a lot of the correlation comes from the fact that the low-English-proficiency countries include some states that are in the process of self-immolation, and the countries that have the highest English proficiency has no one worse off than Greece and Croatia, which are about average on a global scale. The causation probably more goes the other way: the countries that do well on development can afford to have higher English proficiency than those that don't.
That exact bias:
>English proficiency remains a reasonable indicator of a nation's ability to produce goods and services that generate economic growth, and it correlates well to national investment in helping people achieve their full potential by providing education, healthcare and a decent standard of living.
Meanwhile China's boom in the mid 2010-s (China is 2nd to dead last on this chart, above Japan) still had westerners flock to them. In a few instances, disgustingly so. The language barrier at that level of economy is negligible. A few skilled translators are a rounding error for that gold mine.
I'm more than fine with data for data's sake. I have all sorts of useless trivia and statistics that simply put a smile on my face and have little practical use. But using "how good you are at English as a society" to predict economics seems a bit tonedeaf.
That’s not a bias it’s just reality. Of course English proficiency isn’t perfectly correlated with economics. It’s one factor of many.
People aren’t usually trying to just predict GDP or something. A report like this is useful for a big company deciding where to expand. I’m writing this from Colombia, which has a big call center industry, much of it in English.
“English proficiency of a nation doesn’t matter, don’t talk about it much”, which is what you seem to be getting at, is so clearly wrong to me. Maybe it’s the bias of personal experience. Just because it’s not important to you doesn’t mean it’s unimportant in general.
You can talk about it all you want, but the correlation just seems too weak for a statement like the above to track. Nothing in statistics is perfect, but they should at least be reasonable (don't make me bring out the XKCD comic).
And sure. I have bias and didn't do any mass survey. But when you see more and more of your country falling in education ranks, and the people up top trying to appeal more to countries with very poor english skills as opposed to building those facilities domestically. , I'm going to be skeptical that the language of the country matter much in the grand scheme of things.
>the bias of the people who organize this data.
It seems that IMD is based in Switzerland and Singapore.[0] Singapore and Switzerland hold ranks 1 and 2, respectively, in digital competitiveness.[1] Singapore has a high level of English proficiency.[2]
I don't think the mere fact that an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on exists shows that the people who organized this data are biased. English proficiency is important in business, science and programming, to name some examples. I think an argument as to why the inclusion of such a metric is biased should be given.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Institute_for_Ma...
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/articl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index#2...
Singapore is de facto part of the Anglosphere, ergo its 'high level of English proficiency'. Singaporeans are effectively bilingual, and English is used at all levels of interaction, from the wet markets and supermarkets, to the public and private schools and universities, to the highest levels of government administration and communication. Can't get more 'Anglo' than that.
It's natural for the citizens of a country that uses English as though it were its native language to be proficient in it.
To add, I've read about Singapore's English proficiency before in their 2020 census report, which notes that 48% of households speak mainly English at home which is definitely very high and clearly shows that Singaporeans speak English.[0]
[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/cop20... p. 40
It's somewhat ridiculous that Singapore is included in the English proficiency index given that is English is one of its four official languages. Not only that, but it's also the privileged official language that all children must use in school. The other official languages are widespread but not universal.
I think it makes sense to include it because not all Singaporeans are literate in English. For example 17% of Chinese Singaporeans were only literate in Chinese according to the 2020 census report.[0] Additionally, Singapore is not even highest on this list; Netherlands and Norway are slightly above it.[1] However, by the same token, the US should probably also be included due to its high level of non English-speaking immigrants.[2] It's worthwhile to note, however, that the EPI does not test a random sample of the population so the usefulness of these results is not certain.[3] This would be even more of an issue in the US were almost all EPI testers would be immigrants, so the results would look much lower than they actually are.
[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/cop20... p. 42
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... p. 8
[3] https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/d4a8d621480672a1c99...
Is that including people who immigrated or only those who grew up there? Your link [0] mentions "residents" throughout, which implies that it's counting Chinese people who moved to Singapore as adults. I've known a decent number of Singaporeans, including many ethnically Chinese Singaporeans I met while working in Beijing, and I've never met a single person who grew up there and can't read English.
If adult immigrants are included, then I strongly agree with the later part of your comment! There's no reason the US shouldn't similarly be included in the list as it has tens of millions of Spanish-speaking residents who immigrated as adults. Canada, Australia and New Zealand should probably be included too, if Singapore is.
I also assumed it was including mainland Chinese immigrants, especially since the rate of Chinese only is so much higher than Malay only and Tamil only. Lots of wealthy Chinese move to Singapore every year. (A bit different from immigration in the US.)
Why is Singapore even in an English language competition? It's the dominant language there.
Both Switzerland (9m) and Singapore (6m) are tiny. Even if they are at the top of everything per capita, it isn’t very meaningful given that the scale of China, the USA, and the EU, just dwarfs either countries by far.
English is the international lingua franca.
Not being able to speak English means you have limited ability to speak to people from around the world. That's worth 10 words in a report.
Saying "English is the French language", half in Latin says much about English!
A better translation is "Frankish language". The term predates "France" as we know it. Frankish was a Germanic language that was the source of a widely used pidgin throughout western Europe.
It's kind of ironic that we remember the name via the Roman scholars. Rome had fallen and the Holy Roman Empire was very not holy and sure as heck not Roman.
It gets worse than that, it's a term for a trading language that was mostly Italian and originated in Turkey.
Which Turkey are we on about here?
The Franks were mostly Germanic which is why English is considered a Germanic language and why Lingua Franca is a thing and why I can riff on the French (Franks) language being English as a silly joke.
English absorbs vocabulary from wherever and whomever it touches because it abhors a vacuum. I will give you a gold star if you can tell me how many languages I have referenced in that last sentence, and this one.
Byzantine Constantinople, I think, and the Fatimid Empire along the Mediterranean coast to the east. I could have said "Anatolia", but I didn't care to (to be Frank).
> English is the international lingua franca
True, but this underestimates Japanese's prominence.
Japanese (and Korean) fluency is fairly important in much of ASEAN (for example, Vietnam and Thailand), as much of their leadership, rising executives, and rising academics tend to study abroad in Japan.
What's higher education in Japan like?
In Germany and Austria, for example, a lot of graduate level STEM university programs are taught in English, even when everyone in the room is perfectly capable of speaking German, just because the literature is English.
I'm not Vietnamese, but my SO is Vietnamese and used to do medical research in Japan as part of that ASEAN-Japan pipeline (and it's the same model in South Korea and Taiwan).
There are two types of ASEAN students:
1. "Students" - guest workers brought under the "Trainee" program who in reality are temporary guest workers cleaning toilets, gutting fish, manually harvesting strawberries, or working in hostess bars. They are treated similar to how Nepali and Bangladeshi migrant labor would be in UAE because these trainee workers in Japan lack legal support and often in debt to a broker in the home country.
2. Actual Students - brought as part of Japan's soft power diplomacy in ASEAN. They will study in a mix of Japanese and English or full Japanese (depending on the university). They will also be housed in dorms for international students. These students end up becoming civil servants, professors, and potentially business leaders.
Most junior and mid-level professors and medical leadership at top medical universities in Vietnam like UMP tend to be alums of these programs in Japan and SK.
I know this is the Jaapn times and it's focusing on its namesake. But I found it more interesting that the US fell from 1st to 4th in a single year on this digital competitiveness. Hope that isn't a slippery slope.
For Japan, the English skills aren't worth acknowledging. The digital competitiveness is unfortunate, but when you read the reasons (most of the current crises of the world that Japan got to experience first)
>The country still struggles with a number of significant challenges that hamper its efforts to become a technological leader, especially in terms of the ability of companies to adapt and the lack of the workers with the right skills and experience, the survey found.
Some of that lack of agility is cultural, but I suppose this simply all opens up the immigration question that's been pricking at them for some time now.
I don't think the US going 1st->4th is at all meaningful. According to the report the US went from 2nd to 18th in "adaptive attitudes" and 2nd->8th in general "future readiness." This seems more like a difference in how IMD is measuring things than a change in US economy/policy. But maybe the EU did something that moved their rankings upwards?
In general there is too much complexity behind the ranking to tell a meaningful story about such a small decline in said rankings, especially when none of the variables are particularly quantitative in the first place! It's better to interpret this more as "the US is consistently in the top 5" than "the US is slipping," or "those wily Singaporeans finally beat the Americans."
I sure hope so. I did say slippery slope for a reason, I know it's a bad method of thinking overall
But seeing this data after I read other local reports of the US digital literacy plummeting with GenZ does give me a bad omen in my mind. But once is coincidence.
The "good news" is that US youth brain rot is probably a global phenomenon, so it shouldn't affect the rankings :)
> But I found it more interesting that the US fell from 1st to 4th in a single year on this digital competitiveness.
Nit picking, but "falling" from 1st to 4th could simply be because the others "rose" above.
It's not like you have to be digitally worse to do worse in a ranking.
Other people / countries can just be improving faster.
Some might argue it's a pedantic distinction, but I would argue it's pretty important here.
It's like if over the next 30 years, GDP per capita inflation adjusted increases 50% in the US but 75% in China - would you really say the US "lost"?
> I suppose this simply all opens up the immigration question that's been pricking at them for some time now.
No, it's really not, at least not for "digital competitiveness". It's extremely easy to immigrate to Japan for any kind of software or IT job; the government really couldn't make it any easier if they tried.
(Yes, you could make the case that Japan should increase immigration for rural farm work jobs, but that's not the kind of immigration we're talking about here. Bringing in masses of uneducated people with no skills isn't going to help with "digital competitiveness".)
There are several problems affecting digital competitiveness in Japan. A big one is the language itself. English is the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, by a huge margin, and is de-facto the language of tech. Basically, you can't be a competent tech worker and not know English. College-educated people all over the world learn English, especially if they want to work at a global scale (e.g., in the tech industry, but many others too). So Anglophone countries have a huge natural advantage here, because a college-educated tech worker from $country can move to the US or UK or Australia or Canada and start working right away, and start living there without any huge language issues. The same isn't true for places like Japan and Germany, or really any non-English-speaking country. Some places accommodate English extremely well, with Netherlands being the poster child here, and as a result, Netherlands has lots of tech-related immigrants working there. Japan has it even worse because, unlike Germany, the other college-educated people here have poor English skills (every college-educated German I've ever met spoke amazing English), a result of various cultural factors. And unlike most European languages. Japanese is completely alien and not at all related to English, except in its frequent use of loanwords (which are then hard to recognize because of the very different writing system and phonology that it tries to fit them into).
Other problems for tech workers here just come from company culture: traditional companies expect to hire people fresh out of college and train them; they're not very good at hiring experienced people and integrating them into the corporate culture. They typically don't pay well either, so they're not globally competitive.
There are a fair number of smaller companies, typically start-ups, that focus on hiring foreign professionals and have an English-speaking environment, and they do benefit from Japan's very, very easy immigration system for skilled professionals, but you can only employ so many people in a bunch of small companies that aren't even profitable yet, and may never be (i.e., the definition of a start-up).
The government and society do try to accommodate English speakers as best as they can, but it's still challenging because most people, while they learned some English in secondary school, are simply not conversational, and try to avoid using it due to discomfort and fear of failure. But it's getting better, slowly. I didn't have any trouble doing necessary tasks at the local government office when I've had to; they were able to find bilingual workers to help me.
Honestly, I think that, with the two major English-speaking countries shooting themselves in the foot lately, Japan is in a good place to build its tech industry more, perhaps from western companies opening branch offices here. Unlike America which seems to hate immigrants these days (including highly-skilled professionals; the H1B isn't exactly easy or cheap to get, nor is permanent residency), Japan basically rolls the red carpet out for you if you're a college-educated and experienced tech professional, at least as far as visa issues go.
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I find it odd that India is 51st in digital competitiveness. More than half of the Fortune 100 is completely dependent on Indian outsourcing. It is also strange that Vietnam is not on the list. Quite a few companies I interact with have engineering located in Vietnam.
These rankings are always just random marketing bait. I can’t think of a single one that is actually useful and methodologically sound.
Uhh, about that English skill ranking... I wouldn't take that very seriously.
I mean sure, Japan is quite infamous when it comes to English proficiency. But looking at the list, some countries are quite interesting in the "High proficiency" group. I know that in some of these countries most people would die of thirst if they had to ask a glass of water in English (or any other foreign languages, to be exact).
> But looking at the list, some countries are quite interesting in the "High proficiency" group.
The labels are somewhat arbitrary cutoffs (every 50 points), but which country in the “high” category would you say is worse than HK or Honduras (the two top countries in the “moderate” category)?
I could definitely see an argument for a few ranks up or down, especially if you change the ranking criteria.
That said, this list seems directionally correct.
agreed. the newest data is here:
there is absolutely no way that Austria has "Very high proficiency".
I wonder what makes you say this? In my (limited) anecdotal experience, I've noticed that Austrians seem to have far higher levels of English competency than Germans, for example.
Not sure how it’s graded but it is very rare to meet an Austrian who can’t speak basic English and kids in the cities these days are often practically bilingual!
are you sure you're not making that judgement just based on accents? As a German, Austrians and us tend to stand out a bit compared to Swedes or the Dutch in my experience when it comes to spoken English but otherwise proficiency is high, always seems like a bit of an outdated stereotype to me.
I'm guessing Portugal must have improved a lot since I was there in 2019 and didn't have a great time trying to use English. I had better success rate with my extremely atrophied high school Spanish.
I’ve been to Portugal over 20 times in the last 10 years. In Lisbon and Porto, the Portuguese people speak English very well and most with an American accent. Foreigners who come to Portugal [1] and may work service jobs (a more recent phenomenon) may not speak English as well as the native population, while many of them still do still speak English well.
Austria has a big tourist industry sector.
That's debatable, but there are some other howlers. The world's #1 tourist destination Thailand is near the bottom of pack 10 spots below Afghanistan, Finland is below Germany, Switzerland is below Serbia, and South Korea is almost 50 ranks above Japan.
The general population in Thailand has very limited English skills. As a tourist, you’ll encounter Thais whose jobs involve interacting with foreigners, and they can speak some English (not much). As for the rest of the population, english is practically non-existent ("hello", "good bye", and that's it).
There is no way Hong Kong has moderate proficiency and German has high proficiency. It's a bullshit list.
This is coming from a German living in Hong Kong.
I would say that the Dutch think they are a lot more proficient at English than they are.
Crazy to hear as a person who lived there for 7 years and had to conduct 0 conversations in Dutch in business, daily commerce, or interactions with the government. There are trilingual bums.. The only people who didn’t speak English didn’t speak Dutch either.
I wonder if this means that English proficiency rates subject vary a lot by locality.
I have worked there too.
Have you been to some other non English country that spoke better English?
The Philippines should be much higher. The majority of the population can do conversational English. A lot of their media is also American media in English.
The Philippines is already considered "Very high proficiency", second in Asia only after Singapore
Yes, but it’s also higher than many of the European countries listed.
Native English speakers who teach English in Japan make like 30K per year or something in that ridiculous ballpark.
Isn't that the general problem teaching anything there? -- you get the "sensei" honors for free, but have to cope with the fraction of a decent pay.
Japan has English fluency issues (but it can be argued that this is because there isn't much of a need to study English in Japan), but using the EF Test rankings are dumb.
EF's English tests aren't accepted by most institutions.
TOEFLS, IELTS, and CAIE tests are the commonly used English tests globally.
I’m like 94% sure that I could guess a list before lunch that would be closer to the truth than this one.
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