or most of the last half-century, the recipe for a competitive economy was well understood and widely shared. You kept inputs cheap, built supply chains that squeezed out every wasted day and dollar, opened your markets, and trusted a common set of rules to keep everyone honest. Countries that followed the recipe did very well, and so did the companies that optimized for it. When I opened a recent panel on building competitive economies, I wanted to start by admitting that this recipe no longer describes the kitchen we are standing in.
Three forces are arriving at the same time, and any one of them would be enough to unsettle an economic model. Artificial intelligence is changing what human work is worth and how much a small team can build in a matter of months. The energy transition is redrawing the map of who controls the power, minerals, and chips the next economy will run on. And geopolitics has turned trade and technology into instruments of national security, so the efficiency we spent decades perfecting now competes with demands for resilience and control. Together they produce what strategists call a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
In that world, the old question of how to compete more cheaply stops being useful. The harder question is what makes an economy competitive in an increasingly complex and changing environment. The candidates are familiar: the technology a country adopts, the energy it can command, the talent of its people, and the trust its institutions have earned. My provocation to the panel was that each of these matters less as a stock than as a capacity. Competitiveness is becoming less about what an economy has and more about how quickly it can change direction before the next shock arrives.
AI makes the point vividly. It is sold at once as the great equalizer and the great divider, and both claims hold some truth. Advantage does accrue to whoever already holds data, compute, and capital. Yet most of the economic value of the technology comes from adoption rather than invention. The economies that pull ahead will be the ones that put AI to work across hospitals, ports, ministries, and small firms. Adoption at that scale depends on skills, management, and institutional nerve far more than on research budgets.
The same logic applies to the retreat from efficiency. Reshoring, export controls, and the return of industrial policy can be a sensible correction after years of brittle, single-source supply chains. They can also become an expensive way to subsidize champions who would have won anyway. The difference usually lies in whether public money builds capabilities that outlast the subsidy.
That brings me to people. Every leader says talent is their edge, and most then underinvest in it. If workers must reinvent their skills every few years, then the systems that build those skills, from schools to corporate training to public policy, become the core infrastructure of competitiveness. This is why I have argued that digital, media, data, financial, and civic literacies should be treated as foundational rights rather than elite competencies. An economy whose people can learn quickly is an economy that can adapt quickly.
A warning belongs alongside that argument. A strong national competitiveness score can hide a workforce that feels left behind. An economy that people do not experience as working for them will eventually lose the political consent it needs to adapt at all. For smaller and developing economies, the realistic path is to concentrate on a few areas where learning compounds, rather than trying to do everything.
We closed by asking each panelist for one bet that would make an economy competitive in 2050, not just today. Answers differed, but all emphasized the ability to adapt and leverage technology as a functional imperative for economic transformation. Mine is simple: Invest in people's capacity to learn, because it is the one asset that gains value while the ground keeps moving.
Editorial note: This article was adapted from the Family Offices for Sustainable Development Summit at UNGA 81, where Ana C. Rold moderated the high-level panel: “Building Competitive Economies for an Age of Transformation.”
AI disclosure note: AI [Claude Opus 5.5] assisted in the distillation of transcripts from the event. These were used to outline the article before it was drafted by a human.
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Rethinking Competitiveness in a VUCA World
Stock image via Unsplash+
October 7, 2026
AI, the energy transition, and geopolitics are arriving all at once, and the old recipe for competitive economies no longer fits. At UNGA 81, Ana C. Rold argued that advantage now belongs to economies that can adapt quickly, and that the surest path to adaptability runs through people.
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or most of the last half-century, the recipe for a competitive economy was well understood and widely shared. You kept inputs cheap, built supply chains that squeezed out every wasted day and dollar, opened your markets, and trusted a common set of rules to keep everyone honest. Countries that followed the recipe did very well, and so did the companies that optimized for it. When I opened a recent panel on building competitive economies, I wanted to start by admitting that this recipe no longer describes the kitchen we are standing in.
Three forces are arriving at the same time, and any one of them would be enough to unsettle an economic model. Artificial intelligence is changing what human work is worth and how much a small team can build in a matter of months. The energy transition is redrawing the map of who controls the power, minerals, and chips the next economy will run on. And geopolitics has turned trade and technology into instruments of national security, so the efficiency we spent decades perfecting now competes with demands for resilience and control. Together they produce what strategists call a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
In that world, the old question of how to compete more cheaply stops being useful. The harder question is what makes an economy competitive in an increasingly complex and changing environment. The candidates are familiar: the technology a country adopts, the energy it can command, the talent of its people, and the trust its institutions have earned. My provocation to the panel was that each of these matters less as a stock than as a capacity. Competitiveness is becoming less about what an economy has and more about how quickly it can change direction before the next shock arrives.
AI makes the point vividly. It is sold at once as the great equalizer and the great divider, and both claims hold some truth. Advantage does accrue to whoever already holds data, compute, and capital. Yet most of the economic value of the technology comes from adoption rather than invention. The economies that pull ahead will be the ones that put AI to work across hospitals, ports, ministries, and small firms. Adoption at that scale depends on skills, management, and institutional nerve far more than on research budgets.
The same logic applies to the retreat from efficiency. Reshoring, export controls, and the return of industrial policy can be a sensible correction after years of brittle, single-source supply chains. They can also become an expensive way to subsidize champions who would have won anyway. The difference usually lies in whether public money builds capabilities that outlast the subsidy.
That brings me to people. Every leader says talent is their edge, and most then underinvest in it. If workers must reinvent their skills every few years, then the systems that build those skills, from schools to corporate training to public policy, become the core infrastructure of competitiveness. This is why I have argued that digital, media, data, financial, and civic literacies should be treated as foundational rights rather than elite competencies. An economy whose people can learn quickly is an economy that can adapt quickly.
A warning belongs alongside that argument. A strong national competitiveness score can hide a workforce that feels left behind. An economy that people do not experience as working for them will eventually lose the political consent it needs to adapt at all. For smaller and developing economies, the realistic path is to concentrate on a few areas where learning compounds, rather than trying to do everything.
We closed by asking each panelist for one bet that would make an economy competitive in 2050, not just today. Answers differed, but all emphasized the ability to adapt and leverage technology as a functional imperative for economic transformation. Mine is simple: Invest in people's capacity to learn, because it is the one asset that gains value while the ground keeps moving.
Editorial note: This article was adapted from the Family Offices for Sustainable Development Summit at UNGA 81, where Ana C. Rold moderated the high-level panel: “Building Competitive Economies for an Age of Transformation.”
AI disclosure note: AI [Claude Opus 5.5] assisted in the distillation of transcripts from the event. These were used to outline the article before it was drafted by a human.
