Japan ranked 31st in digital competitiveness, 92nd for English skills
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
https://imd.widen.net/s/xvhldkrrkw/20241111-wcc-digital-repo...
via: https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center...
https://imd.widen.net/content/q3p8lowz7b/original/20241111-W...
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.
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 #4https://libraries.emory.edu/sites/default/files/migrated-doc...
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.
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)
Very high English proficiency and a large industry that does assignments for American students
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.
Read the report. It’s really well put together. https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi...
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.
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.
This does not mean that it might not be extremely relevant in a certain subdomain, such as academics. But generally? No.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
It's natural for the citizens of a country that uses English as though it were its native language to be proficient in it.
[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/cop20... p. 40
[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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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"?
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.
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).
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.
there is absolutely no way that Austria has "Very high proficiency".
This is coming from a German living in Hong Kong.
EF's English tests aren't accepted by most institutions.
TOEFLS, IELTS, and CAIE tests are the commonly used English tests globally.