Australia has reversed a slide in the quality of its human talent according to the 2015 World Talent Report ranking released this week by Swiss business school IMD.
The report, from IMD's World Competitiveness Centre, attributes Australia's six-point improvement to 13th place, to its increased appeal to skilled overseas talent and its ability to nurture and develop its existing talent pool. 
However, Australia is let down by its education system which gets fewer resources as a percentage of GDP than other countries.
"This is not a big problem," said the director of the World Competitiveness Centre, Professor Arturo Bris.
He said it was important to look at the trend in the ranking over time, and the report took a holistic approach and was more than an assessment of the education system of a country or the way its companies developed talent.
Professor Bris said that the talent report, now separately published for the second year, is created from data already collected for IMD's better known World Competitiveness Yearbook. 
"It's a big component of that and we think it is the most important component," he said.
Professor Bris said that human talent was the key component of competitiveness because, although it took the longest to change, it was within the power to government to change it.
"This report is useful to any government which wants to improve the talent pool. It says explicitly the methods which you can use," he said.
European countries dominated the 2015 talent ranking, taking eight of the first 10 places. Switzerland was first, followed by Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Canada, German and Singapore.
"The strong pillar of the competitiveness of Europe is the education system," Professor Bris said.
"If Asian countries manage to improve their education systems to create the right talent pool to improve their education systems they will dominate the world."
He said that the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - once hailed as the next generation of major economic powers but now, with the exception of China, languishing, had failed to seize their opportunity to build their talent through better education.
"That's the lesson you can take from Brazil, Russia and India and from China to some extent. In the good times they failed to reform," Professor Bris said.