Malaysia also made significant investments in talent development for the financial services sector. Given its significance in defining performance and resilience of the financial sector, comprehensive institutional arrangements have been put in place for all levels of the industry; at the entry point, at the working and specialist levels, at the professional level and at the leadership levels including for the boards of financial institutions. Finally, as the financial system became more regionally and internationally more integrated, regional financial stability arrangements have also been established. These included advancing collective initiatives in the areas of regional surveillance, the development of regional financial markets and payments infrastructure, and cross-border supervision. Forums for assessment of risks to regional financial stability have also been initiated, and work on establishing an integrated crisis management and resolution framework for the region is in progress. As part of these initiatives, a regional support mechanism has also been established. With these pre-conditions in place, Malaysia commenced initiatives to internationalise our financial system beginning 2003. The internationalisation of the financial sector entailed the advancement in two main areas; financial sector liberalisation and capital account liberalisation. In pursuing greater regional and international financial integration, the aim was to enhance the diversity of the financial system in terms of its product offerings, to improve further the competitiveness of the financial system and to strengthen our economic linkages with the region and other parts of the world. The financial sector liberalisation involved increased foreign entry and participation in our financial system.

5 Encuesta sobre Equipamiento y Uso de Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación en los Hogares, Instituto Nacional de Estadística. 11/18  Human capital Human capital  Educational policies at all levels are crucially important for fostering innovation and adapting the labour force to new occupations and, in general, enabling individuals to acquire and preserve the skills needed to work in an environment characterised by digitalisation, robotisation and artificial intelligence. Specifically, these phenomena will foreseeably affect the future labour market, which will be characterised by increased demand for qualified workers with high technical skills, at the expense of demand for lower skilled workers engaged in routine tasks.6 Having said that, Spain’s starting point to address this challenge of accelerated technological innovation is not the most favourable one. The low performance of Spanish students in standard international exams indicates that the quality of the Spanish educational system leaves room for improvement in comparison with other developed countries. What is more, Spain’s educational system is characterised by high rates of early school leaving: 18.3% in the population between the age of 18 and 24, compared with 10.6% in the European Union as a whole. These shortfalls are also apparent in the adult population as a whole. Thus, in the qualifications obtained in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC) for the working age population, relating to mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, Spain was ranked last and second last, respectively, among the OECD countries.