Talent-development, the driving force behind economic growth

Academics

1649.jpgDecember 2009 | By Cristina Simon, Professor at IE Business School

Attracting and leveraging talent is the challenge now facing Peru if it wants to keep up the sustained economic growth of the last decade.

There is no doubt that a country´s economic development is linked closely to the evolution of its labour market. The problem that so often arises is the difference in speed of both concepts. At the present time, Peru is a magnificent example of this lack of synchronisation between the economy and the human capital that is there to keep it in place. As a result, a ´talent voidâ?? alert has recently appeared and could slow down the so far unstoppable force that has driven the country down a road of sustained growth for almost a decade.

The continuous progress of an economy generates an often very brusque change in the type of human capital that is required. This need for more intellectual work has become more evident in Peru in detriment of unskilled labour: in 1993, the EAP (economically active population) comprised 50% unskilled workers (with no academic qualifications or with primary education only), but the proportion fell to 26.2% in 2007. This figure clearly shows the shift in employers´ requirements and the need for trained, employable personnel, a concept that was christened with the name of ´talent´ in the United States at the end of the 1990s.

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The crisis and the future

Academics

1654.jpgDecember 2009 | By Manuel Romero, Professor at IE Business School

The subprime mortgages unexpectedly sparked the financial crisis, but the resulting raging fire took hold because there was so much more fuel lying around to add to it. How can we rise from the ashes?

The first thing to be considered is the background to the crisis and the essential causes of it. Perhaps the best example has been the strong sensation of liquidity experienced by all the players on the market, which has led to excessive leverage and a significant undervaluation of the risk associated with excess debt and a significant overvaluation of assets that has given rise to clear consequences that include a lack of coherence and macroeconomic consequences such as negative saving rates in the USA and investment records in China in excess of the GDP. All the market analysts expected the system to break down as a result of macrospeculators such as the hedge funds and the CDS (Credit Default Swaps), but neither of the two originated the crisis.

The origin of the crisis actually came from an unexpected trigger, more specifically, the heavy default produced by ´sub-prime´ mortgages, which were none other than loans awarded to the so-called ´NINJAs´, i.e. people in the USA with no income, no job, and no assets, that had been securitised, which means that those who awarded the loans just sold them on the market, in many cases leaving nothing showing in their balances. One of the surprising aspects is that a market as small as the sub-prime mortgage market was the detonator of this entire situation.

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