Economics

This report provides an overview of how economists think about literacy, and what the available evidence suggests about the economic value of literacy.

Despite recent declines in high school dropout rates, thousands of young Canadians still leave high school every year without a diploma.

This study, commissioned by the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum (CAF), examines the costs and benefits to employers of apprenticeship training.

In March 2009, MCL commissioned Resources for Results, a private research and evaluation firm, to conduct a baseline study to explore the effects of the recent economic downturn on literacy and essential skills programs across Canada.

In this report, the authors discuss the cost and the importance of investing in literacy. They suggest that advanced literacy is the single most important tool that Canadians need to compete in the global economy and present estimates of the total cost of raising the literacy skill of the adult population to Level 3.

This resource is a powerpoint presentation of 76 slides by T. Scott Murray, Director, Learning Outcomes, of the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. In his presentation, Murray discusses the importance of skills and learning in terms of public policy, particularly in regards to the Province of Alberta.

The study presented here examines the link between literacy, the economy, and individual income, the premise being that an individual with greater literacy skills would be expected to have better employment opportunities and command higher earnings. The authors begin by examining the distribution of literacy skills in the Canadian economy and how they are generated, looking in particular at schooling and parental influence.

Canada’s preparedness to compete in the increasingly competitive, knowledge-based, global marketplace appears to be in jeopardy because of a lack of awareness that investing in the human capacity of Canada’s workforce is paramount to success.

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was a seven-country initiative conducted in the fall of 1994 to create comparable literacy profiles across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This is a report of a study that analyses the New Brunswick data collected for the IALS in order to better understand literacy in the province.

What determines the differences in living standards across economies over the long run? This is the basic question that the authors of this paper attempt to answer. More specifically, this paper examines the role of human capital accumulation in explaining relative levels of income per capita across Canadian provinces between 1951 and 2001.