with minimal residence requirements have to be careful to protect their programs’ reputations. Screening procedures to weed out applicants with criminal backgrounds or illegally obtained wealth help to reduce reputational risks which — in a worst case scenario — could make other countries unwilling to offer visa-free travel to a country’s citizens. This screening is much more thorough than most countries require for their tourist or business visas; but has inherent limits and the risk of bad apples entering through the program cannot be eliminated entirely.
Where next for investor programs? Growing demand from the world’s new wealthy classes, particularly in China, seem likely to fuel investor immigration for the foreseeable future. As governments rush to introduce new programs, learning from other countries’ experiences will be important. Popular destinations with longstanding programs, like Australia and Canada, have recently reassessed their policies for good reasons, including looking for ways to admit immigrants who make more active economic contributions. As governments continue to review their immigrant investor routes and as new countries enter the market, their challenge will be to maintain the programs’ integrity and reputation while demonstrating their economic value much more clearly.
Ms. Sumption is the Director of Research for the International Program at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) — an independent research institute with offices in Washington D.C. and Brussels. Ms. Sumption oversees the International Program’s research agenda and leads MPI’s work on the economics of immigration. Her research focuses on the design and implementation of work-based visa policies, investor residence and citizenship, and the economic impacts of immigration policies in Europe, North America, and other high-income countries. Her other areas of expertise include immigrants’ labor-market integration and international cooperation on mobility (including free movement and the recognition of qualifications). She is also a nonresident fellow with the Migration Policy Institute Europe.
Ms. Sumption recently published a policy overview of investor residence programs, Selling Visas and Citizenship: Policy Questions from the Global Boom in Investor Immigration, which is available at migrationpolicy.org/research/selling-visas-and-citizenship-policy-questions-global-boom-investor-immigration
Other recent publications include Remaking the US Green Card System (co-author); Rethinking Points Systems and Employer-Selected Immigration (coauthor); Policies to Curb Illegal Employment; Projecting Human Mobility in the United States and Europe for 2020 (Johns Hopkins, coauthor); Migration and Immigrants Two Years After the Financial Collapse (BBC World Service and MPI, co-editor and author); Immigration and the Labor Market: Theory, Evidence and Policy (Equality and Human Rights Commission, co-author); and Social Networks and Polish Immigration to the UK (Institute for Public Policy Research).
Country Competitiveness, Talent Development and Residence Programs: A Brief Overview of the Parallels
Dr. José Caballero
IMD World Competitiveness Centre,
Lausanne/Switzerland
The IMD World Competitiveness Ranking21, published by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, measures how well countries manage their overall resources to increase their long-term value creation. The ranking covers 61 countries and reflects more than 300 criteria, of which two-thirds are based on statistical indicators and one-third on a survey of 6,200 international executives. In this article, we trace the impact of two drivers of competitiveness: Country image and the quality of life it offers.
The competitiveness ranking includes a criterion related to the reputation of countries. To be precise, this criterion evaluates the image abroad of countries by asking executives to evaluate if the government of the country in which they reside encourages or discourages business development. The evaluation of a country’s image may reflect the impact of factors such as the executives’ perceptions about business regulation, the country’s adherence to the rules of international trade and the existence of barriers to investment by foreign nationals (e.g. regulation of capital markets).
The ranking also measures the quality of life by enticing executives to reflect on the level (whether they consider it high or low) of their country’s quality of life. Factors that may influence this criterion include the individuals’ ability to meet their ‘material’ expectations (e.g., access to specific goods and services), their life satisfaction (e.g., ability to enjoy family time) and absence of threats (e.g., effective government policies against crime and the protection of individual rights).
The IMD World Competitiveness Center also publishes the yearly IMD World Talent Report22. In this context, talent is understood as the skills and competencies necessaries to successfully perform specific activities. The talent report assesses the extent to which countries develop, attract and retain talent in order to sustain the talent pool available for enterprises operating in their economies.
The following table introduces the overall 2015 IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, the two survey rankings based on the image abroad and quality of life criteria, and the overall 2015 IMD World Talent Report. Please note that Table 1 only presents those countries that are common to the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking/Talent Report and the Global Residence Program Index (GRPI; not shown in this article).
In general there is a strong correlation between a country’s overall competitiveness ranking and its international image as a place to do business. The sample presented includes five of the top 10 countries from the overall competitiveness ranking. Four of those five countries also make it to the top 10 for having an image abroad that encourages business development, according to executives based in each of these countries. Some executives, however, are far gloomier about their countries’ images which leads to some incongruities between the competitiveness ranking and a country’s image. For example, the US ranks first in overall competitiveness but emerges in the 23th spot for image abroad. Similarly, Belgium ranks 23th and 37th respectively.
Table 1. Competitiveness and Relevant Criteria
In relation to the quality of life, it seems that most executives residing in the top 10 countries of the competitiveness ranking find the quality of life in those countries in need of enrichment; for example, Singapore ranks 3rd in the overall ranking but emerges 17th in the quality of life criterion. Of the sample presented, only Switzerland and Canada remain in the top 10 countries of both rankings.
Executives from countries found in the lower rankings of competitiveness conceived the quality of life in those countries as high. For example, Greece ranks 50th in competitiveness but 36th in quality of life; similarly, Spain ranks 37th and 21st respectively while Austria ranks 26th in overall competitiveness but 3rd in quality of life. This trend is consistent with studies that note an inverse relationship between economic progress and elements of the quality of life, such as a healthy environment23.
The IMD World Competitiveness Ranking and the GRPI largely coincide; although there are few exceptions. In the competitiveness rankings, Singapore and Hong Kong are placed in the top half of the group (3rd and 2nd respectively) while they rank in the bottom half of the GRPI (14th and 16th respectively). Similarly, Portugal ranks 36th in the competitiveness ranking (bottom half) while it ranks first in the GRPI.
It is also interesting to note the parallels between the overall rankings of the IMD World Talent Report and the GRPI. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Portugal, Switzerland, the UK and the US are placed in the top half of both rankings. Although, as in the case of the competitiveness