Insights into the State of Financial Literacy in Germany: First Results of a Nationwide Survey

Abstract

Financial literacy is playing an increasingly important role in today's complex world. Since the beginning of the new millennium, more countries and international organizations have recognized the importance of measuring and educating people about financial literacy, for example, to guide their market behavior. Using the OECD understanding of financial education and with the help of the OECD toolkit for this, the current state of financial literacy was recorded as part of a Germany-wide representative survey. Methodologically, the aim is to use exploratory data analysis to present an initial analysis and evaluation of the primary data collected. This is also linked to an investigation of what kind of connections exist between the various variables, and which factors can explain financial literacy in Germany. The results show that many respondents consider financial literacy to be rather important to very important and rate their own financial literacy as rather good to very good. However, the measurement of financial literacy shows that out of a total of 20 possible points, only an overall average of 10.7 points is achieved. In addition, differences can be found between the age groups, with the score increasing with age. Multiple linear regressions with all subscores and the final score as the dependent variable, and different independent variables, yield highly significant results and explain a moderate to strong amount of variance.