Top Ten List: 2024

Welcome to the 2024 Holiday Top Ten list. This annual list has been a labor of love for the past 24 years and is one of the ways I have stayed in touch with far-flung friends and colleagues. This year I recount the origin of the list and bring everyone up to date on the future of the Top Ten.

10. In the beginning: In 2001, I started the Top Ten to track and rank websites on competitiveness and cluster development which I then shared with a few colleagues. As a youthful loan officer at the Inter-American Development Bank, I was hungry for data, articles and contacts on the topic. I scoured the web for nuggets of information using long-forgotten search engines -- like Lycos, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo... and of course Google. In fact, the colors of the letterhead in the Holiday Top Ten are stolen from the latter’s logo (a fact I will deny if sued).

9. Clusters and Competitiveness:? By 2002, I was distributing the list to 100+ colleagues in Latin America and worldwide. The list included IMD’s and the?WEF’s competing country rankings and a host of other websites.? At the time, the IDB sponsored competitiveness councils in various countries,?regional conferences, and research on the topic. In this context, the earliest rankings found a following and were re-published here (2010); (2009); and Stockholm School of Economics (2006, 2007). The older versions are lost to time.?

8. It's who you know:? Early on I was fortunate to collaborate with the likes of Michael Porter (LINK), Michael Fairbanks (LINK), Kevin Murphy (LINK), Eric Hansen (LINK), Christian Ketels (LINK), Parviz Dabir-Alai (LINK), Bob Devlin (LINK), and others.? If these were the gurus of public-private collaborative models, then Porter was the equivalent of Adam Smith. The national competitiveness councils I helped create promoted Porter's economies of agglomeration (or cluster model) – think of Silicon Valley in the US or the Salmon industry in Chile. I was able to work with public and private sector leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama.

7. Going Regional: By 2009 I was part of the group that established a regional apex organization for the competitiveness councils of Latin American and the Caribbean-- RIAC. As the IDB representative I attended the founding meeting in Santiago, Chile and was a signatory to its charter. It seemed that the power of collaborative models had moved from academia to the forefront of development policy.?

6. The Pivot:? In a modest way the list caught on. So I was surprised, but not shocked, when a colleague from a cluster organization wrote to me and said that since they had dropped in the ranking, he assigned a team to revamp their website. Yikes! I never intended this as an objective indicator, nor was I comfortable that resources were being diverted because of my subjective and unscientific opinion. I had to pivot.

5. Caveat Lector: From 2011 onward, I converted the Top Ten to a list of topics and readings that I found interesting with the addition of a clear warning label:

"The list was gathered in a unscientific manner during 2011 based on my random cyberwalk through the internet and is meant for those practitioners who, like me, are interested in the interaction between economics and development."

4. Swedish Meal: From that year the Top Ten took on a different tone. It was a smorgasbord of ideas and topics that interested me. Among them: how to measure social impact, impact investing, poverty reduction programs, RCTs, ESG, blockchain, AI, and other topics. As each year drew to a close, I collected a sample of topics and readings I had perused and put them into a nominal Top Ten list. It was even less of an official ranking, though the rigor of keeping the list helped focus my attention on the most interesting topics.?

3. IPad, UPad, WePad:? The other key feature of the Top Ten was that it was heavy in hyperlinks. That was a feature from the early days, but with innovation of the IPad (circa 2010) readers could sit with their morning coffee and click on the links that interested them, and follow them down a rabbit hole of their own choosing. For that reason, I always made the list as interactive as possible by connecting to presentations, books, TED talks and links to some of my favorite music -- it was akin to a Borgesian Library of Babel.

2. Mass Mailing:? By 2016, the annual mailing list had 600+ names and I was reaching a ceiling in the number of BCCs I could include. This led to a combined personal email and a LinkedIn post to the wider world. I was also transitioning to a new career at? KPMG to work on international development and ESG topics. This opened up a new range of ideas to tackle and learning curves to ascend. As a result, I wrote some of my favorite lists that continued to generate positive feedback from readers. (You can peruse them on my LinkedIn page 1), 2), 3)).

1.? The Final Curtain:? The Top Ten list has followed a winding path through the years -- steadily veering off its original course. Yet, as someone once said, "its the journey, not the destination that matters". This journey has been rewarding. I have kept in touch with colleagues, long-time friends, and even made new friends.

Alas, this year is likely my last Top Ten. In a matter of days I am retiring from KPMG and plan to turn my attention to other pursuits. With that in mind, I did not want to leave this nearly quarter-century effort without a final punctuation mark.? A huge THANK YOU for all the friendships / likes / comments / and emails the list has generated over the years.? The experience has enriched my life and, I hope, has had a similar effect on those who have taken time to read them. Thanks to all of you!?

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

All the best,

Martin?