Documento de trabajo
Functional literacy and job opportunities
Fecha
2002Registro en:
Series Documentos de Trabajo Nº 195 Agosto 2002
Autor
Bravo Urrutia, David
Contreras Guajardo, Dante
Larrañaga Jiménez, Osvaldo
Institución
Resumen
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.