Financial literacy of Italian adults

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The Bank of Italy has conducted two surveys on the financial literacy and competence of Italian adults (IACOFI), one in 2017 and the other in 2020, based on the methodology developed by the OECD's International Network on Financial Education (INFE). The INFE's methodology was used to assign a financial education score of between 1 and 21, which is the sum of three components: financial knowledge (0 to 7), behaviour (0 to 9) and attitudes (1 to 5). The responses of adults aged 18 to 79 were used to calculate the OECD score, although persons aged 80 and over were also interviewed.

The raw data have been distributed in anonymous form for research purposes. Users bear full and exclusive responsibility for the use of the data, for which the Bank of Italy accepts no responsibility. The data are available in ASCII (Comma Separated Values), SAS and Stata formats.

2020 Survey

The survey, carried out in the first few months of 2020, was conducted on a total sample of about 2,000 individuals, representative of the Italian adult population, who were interviewed using the computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technique. The methodology is described on the OECD website and the initial results at international level were published in the report on the OECD/INFE 2020 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy. The data for Italy are analysed in 'Financial literacy in Italy: the results of the Bank of Italy's 2020 survey', by Giovanni D'Alessio, Riccardo De Bonis, Andrea Neri and Cristiana Rampazzi, Banca d'Italia, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers), n. 588.

2017 Survey

The survey, carried out in the first few months of 2017, was conducted on a total sample of about 2,500 individuals, representative of the Italian adult population, who were interviewed using the computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technique or via remotely-connected tablet devices. The main methodologies and results of the survey are described in 'Measuring the financial literacy of the adult population: the experience of Banca d'Italia', by Antonietta di Salvatore, Francesco Franceschi, Andrea Neri and Francesca Zanichelli, Banca d'Italia, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers), June 2018. The results of the survey at international level were published by the OECD in the Survey on measuring financial literacy and financial inclusion.