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Introduction
Governments around the world have expressed concern about the low level of financial literacy among their citizens. In this context, in 2008, the OECD created an International Network on Financial Education (INFE) to facilitate the sharing of experience and expertise among international experts from public bodies on the topic and to promote the development of both analytical work and policy recommendations.
The work of the OECD/INFE focuses on financial literacy and education policy areas considered to be particularly topical. Among these, measurement of the level of financial literacy at both national and international levels rapidly emerged as critical in order to better inform policy-makers' interventions.
Measuring the level of knowledge and understanding of a population and assessing its behaviours with regard to finances are fundamental to identifying potential needs and gaps relating to financial literacy, as well as to identifying at-risk groups. Once a benchmark is set, the measurement exercise can be repeated in order to evaluate the impact of large-scale interventions aimed at addressing the issues.
The comparison of such a measure across countries will provide some important information about which national financial education and/or consumer protection practices work best, further guiding policy-makers' decision-making process. Harmonised data from across a wide range of countries is also of huge interest to researchers, academics, and policy analysts seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the variation in levels of financial literacy around the world.
The lack of such an international measure and comparable data, along with requests by many countries for good practices on obtaining a robust measure of financial literacy at the national level, prompted the OECD and its INFE to launch projects aimed at filling these gaps and meeting these requests. Two projects have been initiated in recent years in this area. The first is the development and implementation of an internationally comparable approach to assessing the financial literacy levels of adults; the second is the measurement of the financial literacy levels of 15-year-old students via the 2012 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
This paper focuses on the first of these projects. It discusses the development of the OECD/INFE international survey on financial literacy, highlighting the related challenges, the process of identifying suitable...