Highlights

In today's global economic climate, no-one wants to focus on the issue of migration. The topic is politically fraught, socially contentious, and technically challenging. But it is also one of the more promising options for boosting shared prosperity by productively employing young and mobile workers to meet the growing demands of ageing populations for labor-intensive services as well as to fuel innovation and competitiveness as the global race for talent intensifies. The foundations for functional migration systems -- at all skill levels--need to be laid now, in order to lower the human cost of, and capture the substantial gains from, migration.  

This is the argument presented by Manjula Luthria and
Pamela Dale in "Liberalising the global market for labour: from paralysis to policy innovation" a chapter in INSEAD's 2013 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI). This chapter informs the GTCI's discussion of how talent is grown, attracted, and retained by demonstrating the tremendous opportunity for individual- and household-level welfare gains for migrants, and the productivity and competitiveness gains for globalizing economies through increased labor mobility for workers of all skill levels. It then provides recommendations on the policy and institutional frameworks necessary for labor movements to be facilitated and coordinated so that they are safe for the people who move and beneficial for the places they move to and from.  

Mobility has been redefined. Ideas, know-how, and innovative and entrepreneurial people routinely cross borders and generate value locally and globally

Bruno Lanvin and Paul Evans, INSEAD

There is a widespread mismatch between what companies need in terms of skills and what local labour markets can offer.

Ilian Mihov, Dean of INSEAD

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