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Benchmarking the Effective Literacy Rate

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Author Info
Lee, Travis (Cornell U)
Abstract

By now the importance of literacy in the process of development is widely accepted. However, unlike measuring welfare or inequality, the problem of literacy measurement remains largely unexamined. Alternatives to the standard literacy rate, R, equal to the number of literate adults as a percentage of the adult population, are not well known, but this measure has its deficiencies. In particular, several authors have identified the externality accruing to proximate illiterates, that is, illiterate people with access to a literate person. The standard literacy rate ignores this externality; measures of effective literacy are sensitive to it. The present note offers two effective literacy rates (measures) and a set of axioms characterizing each. Nearly all measures of effective literacy appearing in the literature are greater than or equal to R. In fact, the best known of these, the Basu-Foster measure L*, is strictly greater in virtually every case (see Basu and Foster [1]). Although the inequality L* >= R is an unintended consequence of their construction, it amounts to setting a benchmark for the effective literacy rate. This notes examines Basu and Foster's framework and offers an alternative benchmark.

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Paper provided by Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics in its series Working Papers with number 07-13.

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Date of creation: Jul 2007
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Handle: RePEc:ecl:corcae:07-13

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Maddox, Bryan, 2007. "Worlds Apart? Ethnographic Reflections on "Effective Literacy" and Intrahousehold Externalities," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 532-541, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Dutta, Indranil, 2004. "Generalized measures of literacy," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 69-80, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Basu, Kaushik & Narayan, Ambar & Ravallion, Martin, 2001. "Is literacy shared within households? Theory and evidence for Bangladesh," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(6), pages 649-665, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Gibson, John, 2001. "Literacy and Intrahousehold Externalities," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 155-166, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Basu, Kaushik & Narayan, Ambar & Ravallion, Martin, 1999. "Is knowledge shared within households?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2261, The World Bank. [Downloadable!]
  6. Basu, Kaushik & Foster, James E, 1998. "On Measuring Literacy," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 108(451), pages 1733-49, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  1. Kaushik Basu & Travis Lee, 2009. "A new and easy-to-use measure of literacy, its axiomatic properties and an application," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 32(2), pages 181-196, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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