BRAIN DRAIN

The Economist Intelligence Unit recently released a white paper on global IT competitiveness. Sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, the report entitled The Means to Compete: Benchmarking IT Competitiveness ranks the IT industries of sixty-four countries. It develops a 100-point “IT industry competitiveness index” that takes into account such factors as each country’s prevailing business environment, government support for the industry, supply of skilled labor and existing technology infrastructure.

There are few surprises at the top of the list, with the United States taking the top spot (score: 77.4) followed by Japan and South Korea (72.7 and 67.2 respectively), although Switzerland (63.5) did manage to edge out tech-savvy Singapore (63.1) for the top-tenth ranking. Curiously, India — the darling of the Business Process Outsourcing world — landed forty-sixth out of sixty-four, barely edging out the Philippines with a score of 29.1 to 28.7. Meanwhile, rounding out the bottom of the list are Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Nigeria and Iran, each with scores below 20.

The entire report is available free, at least for now. A straightforward summary (showing the results) can also be obtained over at CNET.com.