Functional literacy and job opportunities

Abstract

The first time in which the International Adult Literacy Survey was carried out in a developing country was in 1998 in Chile. The survey measures the effective skills of the population over 15 years of age in the comprehension and processing of texts, documents and quantitative information on a continuous scale of performance. This paper analyses the relation between literacy and job opportunities for men between 15 and 65 years of age in Chile. The results suggest that there is a dynamic relation between the development and the use of this type of skills. Thus, it is shown that schooling as well as in–work experience contribute to the development of these skills. Moreover, higher literacy ability is linked to greater work productivity and higher incomes for low-trained workers. Amongst better educated workers, literacy ability has no effect on earnings, apart from the already internalised higher educational attainments that this would imply.