I'm surprised that Kenya is not in the list.
Very high English proficiency and a large industry that does assignments for American students
Probably the chinese immigrants and not the kenyans themselves. China has been indebting Africa for a while now, They are happy to take land when cash payments fail
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...
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.
Country credit rating #1
Robots in education and R&D #2
E-participation #3
Graduates in Science #4
Computer science education index #4I 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.
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 page 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.
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.
English fluency matters less for Japan, for what it’s worth. They have their own Japanese versions of everything.
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.
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!
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.
I 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...
Some of their metric are dubios (number of published AI articles - wtf?) and the weighting seems arbitrary.
So like every ranking ever
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.