Lisbon, June 27, 2024 (Lusa) - The financial literacy of students in Portugal is in line with the OECD average, but Portuguese young people, despite having less contact with digital financial products and activities, excel when it comes to comparing prices.
The conclusion comes from the PISA 2022 financial literacy assessment, which evaluates the performance of 15-year-old students in different dimensions, and whose results were released on Thursday.
According to the data for Portugal, systematised by the Institute for Educational Evaluation (IAVE), Portuguese students scored 494 points, on a scale of zero to 1,000, in line with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 498 points.
Among the 20 countries that took part in the financial literacy assessment, Portugal ranked 9th, in an assessment that looks at dimensions such as family, social, individual and work contexts, content such as planning and managing finances, risks and advantages or financial scenarios, and processes related to identifying and analysing financial information, situations and issues.
The results point to the impact of students' socio-economic status, which influences around 10% of the variation in performance, and the most disadvantaged students scored an average of 74 points less than their more favoured peers, with young immigrants also performing less well.
The strongest correlation, however, is between performance in financial literacy and performance in maths and reading literacy, which accounts for 79% of the variation.
Looking at the lowest performing students, 91% also did worse in maths and 83% in literature. At the other end of the spectrum, 53% of the top performers in financial literacy did just as well in maths and 38% in literature.
In the overall assessment, around 85% of students reached the minimum level of proficiency (82% in the OECD) and 6.6% are considered 'top performers', i.e. they are able to "apply a wide variety of financial terms and concepts, analyse complex financial products and solve non-routine financial problems that will probably only become relevant in their adult lives".
Also in line with the OECD average, the results are better among boys compared to girls, but there are aspects in which Portuguese students differ from their peers in other countries.
For example, when it comes to comparing prices 80% of Portuguese students compare prices in several shops before buying and 72% do so between physical shops and online shops.
Seven out of 10 students go even further and prefer to wait for the product to become cheaper before buying it, a behaviour that, looking at the OECD average, is only followed by around half of young people.
On the other hand, the Portuguese are well below average when it comes to contact with financial products and digital financial activities, especially when it comes to having a bank account (38% against 63% of the OECD average) or a debit or credit card (27% against 62%).
Online shopping, mobile phone payments and bank card payments are more common, but national students still lag behind and are also less confident in using digital financial services.
In these cases, just over half of young people feel confident about money transfers, mobile payments and ensuring the security of confidential information when making a payment or using online banking.
When confronted with certain financial terms, students know the meaning of six out of a list of 16 and the majority know what the terms "salary", "bank loan" or "budget" mean, for example.
However, less than 20% know what "compound interest", "exchange rate", "depreciation", "diversification" are.
PISA 2022 also looked at the school context and concludes that 32% of students have contact with financial literacy activities in maths lessons and 30% in citizenship lessons, but they are more often confronted with tasks that explore the difference between spending money on what you need or what you want.
MCA/AYLS // AYLS
Lusa
