Literacy and the labour market : Littératie et marché du travail : formation de compétences et incidence sur les gains de la population de souche

Statistics Canada also renormalized test results from the remaining 55% of the questions in 2003 so that the overall average test scores from 2003 bore the same relationship to the overall average in 1994 as do the averages on the questions that are identical between the two years. [...] The result is samples of size 3,964 for the IALS 1994 and 14,666 for the IALSS 2003, which form the basis of our initial analysis of the distribution of literacy skills in Canadian society. [...] The minimum Document score in the sample is 84, representing extremely low proficiency at the Document test tasks, while the highest is 436.2 Inequality in the distribution is reflected in an associated Gini coefficient value of 0.107 and a value for the log of the ratio of the 90th percentile to the 10th percentile of 0.513. [...] In Table 1, we present a depiction of the joint distribution of literacy and family income, showing the percentage of observations in each cell in a grid defined by the 5 quintiles of the Document literacy distribution and the five quintiles of the household (pre-tax and transfer) income distribution. [...] In particular, we are interested in the relationship of literacy to parental resources since that relationship is fundamentally linked to notions of equity: to the extent that one generation’s literacy hinges on the resources of the previous generation, differences in literacy can be seen as arising from characteristics beyond the control of the people involved.