Public investment in skills: are Canadian governments doing enough?
C.D. Howe Institute Commentary › Nbr. 2005, February 2005
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The Education Papers
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Public investment in skills: are Canadian governments doing enough?
Most observers view Canada as a country that has a good education system with a high level of public funding. However, its performance in generating a skilled labour force does not stand out among the 30 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As well, results from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), conducted between 1994 and 1998, place Canada in the middle of the pack in terms of literacy scores among a group of 20 countries. (1) The IALS defines literacy skills as "the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities, at home, at work and in the community, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential". The survey tested these skills for individuals between 16 and 65 years of age over three broad areas--prose literacy, document literacy and quantitative literacy. It sampled everyday job tasks, ranging from simple to highly complex and thought to be closely associated with labour productivity.
Canada ranked respectively 5th, 8th and 9th on the prose, document and quantitative literacy scales (OECD 2000). However, many of the countries located at the lower end of the sample are significantly less developed economically than Canada. They include Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia. Canada does not perform well when compared to countries at a similar level of development. Perhaps more worrisome is the fact that, when looking only at less-educated individuals, those who have not completed upper secondary school, Canada ranks respectively 13m, 14th and 14th in prose, document and quantitative skills. As well, among individuals aged 16-to-25 who have completed secondary education, Canada ranks 8th, 8th and 13th in prose, document and quantitative skills, indicating that the Canadian schooling system is not doing well at providing young people with the skills required to perform well in the labour market. Currently, most discussion focuses on the role of post-secondary education in providing highly skilled workers for the knowledge economy as a means of ensuring international competitiveness. However, our recent research (Coulombe, Tremblay and Marchand 2004) reminds us of the equal, if not greater, importance of increasing the general level of literacy and numeracy skills among young people, to some extent the purview of primary and secondary schools. The research--novel because it is based on direct measures of skills, rather than the usual crude proxies that use educational attainment--strongly suggests that there are potentially large pay-offs from investment in these less-glamorous sectors, or at least in what should be some of their core activities. The pay-offs come in the form of increased economic growth, which benefits society as a whole. They force us ...See the full content of this document
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