THE COUNTRY should strengthen its human resource base by focusing on education, particularly in the sciences, if it wants to climb up the global competitiveness ladder, according to a senior member of the academe.

Federico Macaranas, executive director of the Asian Institute of Management Policy Center, said one of the biggest bottlenecks to the country?s progress was its ?weak grasp of technical and scientific knowledge.?

?We graduate very few scientists each year,? he noted in a presentation at the Metro Manila Business Conference 2009 last Friday.

Macaranas said there was a pressing need for innovation, which could only come about with a stronger human capital base.

To achieve this, he said, the country should place more emphasis on science, math and engineering in its overall educational program.

There should also be a push for Service Science Management Engineering (SSME), Macaranas said, a program that aimed to produce both technically skilled and socially equipped individuals.

In a separate presentation, Angelo Timoteo Diaz de Rivera of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), said the CICT was pushing the adoption of the SSME model in various colleges and universities, as well as industries, all over the country.

A model formulated by computing giant IBM, SSME is a discipline that brings together scientific understanding, engineering principles and management practices to design, create and deliver service systems. Its primary goal is to improve services innovation and quality.

According to the latest World Competitiveness Yearbook, a study jointly published in the country by AIM and the International Institute for Management Development, the Philippines is the worst performer in Asia in terms of science education. The country also posted the second lowest score, topping only Indonesia, in the basic research aspect.

The Philippines also ranked low in technological infrastructure (35th out of 57 countries) and scientific infrastructure (56th place) subcategories.

The low ranking in scientific infrastructure, in particular, should be a cause for concern as this was attributed to the country?s poor showing in the basic scientific research and education criteria for the subcategory.