Our Annual Look at the Toronto Region's Competitiveness
This Year's Focus: Understanding our Human Capital
Performance
Toronto as a Global City: Scorecard On Prosperity 2013 benchmarks the
Toronto Region against 23 global metropolitan areas. This year, the
Region ranked 6th overall, 12th economically and 5th for labour
attractiveness. Scorecard 2013 also examines a pillar of economic
productivity, this year putting a lens on "Human Capital." This focus
compliments previous Scorecard research that focused on cluster
strategies, transportation infrastructure, and access to
capital.
We thank Certified Management Accountants of Ontario who have generously
supported this initiative for five years. Their support is invaluable
to understanding how we rank and where we as a business community can
focus our attention to drive the Toronto Region’s competitiveness.
Hover over each of these urban regions to see its ranking vs the
Toronto Region.
Understanding the Results:
Data in Scorecard 2013 again ranks the Toronto Region as among the
world's best global metropolises. At sixth overall, Toronto is in the
top quarter of the 24 benchmarked metropolitan areas. The heart of
Toronto’s success is the region’s consistently good record on labour
attractiveness. However, Toronto’s struggles in the economic domain
persist, especially vis-à-vis global leaders such as San Francisco,
Boston and Seattle. A consistent outcome from all Scorecards has been
Toronto's middling economic and productivity-related performance,
particularly with regard to its U.S. counterparts.
The quality of human capital greatly affects productivity growth in a
metropolitan region. Here, the Toronto Region ranks among the best. When
measured against all North American metros, Toronto places fourth.
Toronto's best results come in the areas of health and safety,
employment in high-skilled occupations, post-secondary education, and
relative success in the area of female-to-male income. Toronto’s
excellent overall score on human capital masks some troubling
weaknesses that leave no room for complacency especially in the areas of
education, females in the labour force, skills of immigrants and youth
unemployment. Toronto needs to ensure that its fundamentally strong
human capital assets continue as a comparative advantage for the
region.
