National Adult Literacy Database

In this document, the author offers a plain-language summary of a 2001 Statistics Canada report that used Canadian data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) to investigate the relationship between labour market success and literacy skills. The specific skills measured in IALS were prose literacy, document literacy, and numeracy.

Statistics Canada concluded that literacy does indeed have a large effect on earnings, with each additional year of education raising annual earnings by approximately 8.3 percent.

While the analysis also provided some support for the view that literacy skills may play a role in how well immigrants adjust to their entry into the Canadian labour market, the Statistics Canada report concluded that the small number of immigrants in the study sample made it difficult to draw valid conclusions.

This document is part of a National Adult Literacy Database (NALD) project, funded by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), aimed at providing a way of quickly assessing the usefulness and relevancy of a number of online research documents from Statistics Canada.