The Index covers 21 countries from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. With an average score of 67.36, the region ranks in third place globally, after North America and Western Europe. It includes several remarkable success stories with regard to successful human capital development, including Slovenia (9) and Estonia (12), which both score within the overall Index top 15, and the Russian Federation (16), Czech Republic (22), Ukraine (24) and Lithuania (25), which all score above the 70% threshold. Ukraine’s performance is particularly high relative to its GDP per capita levels.

Most countries in the region are close to having achieved near universal basic education enrolment. Some, however, such as Moldova (62) and Romania (42), still lag behind. The bottom-ranked countries in the region, Macedonia, FYR  (67) and Albania (85), are also held back by the persistence of high unemployment and underemployment rates across all age groups, resulting in low scores across the Deployment subindex.

The Russian Federation (16) performs well on both the Capacity and Deployment subindexes, benefiting from very high levels of primary, secondary and tertiary education attainment across all of its age groups. However, these achievements are not matched by the current quality of its education system, staff training or performance across the Know-how subindex. This indicates a need for additional efforts in future workforce development and preparing the country’s population for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In general, countries scoring in the lower-half of the region’s league table such as Kyrgyz Republic (46) and Tajikistan (57), outperform on the Capacity subindex, benefiting from formally well-educated older populations—a legacy of the region’s former heavily state-led school systems—but underperform with regard to labour force participation and deployment of the region’s talent pool in skill-intensive working environments.