RIEB Discussion Paper Series No.2019-20

Title

Consumer's Financial Literacy and Financial Troubles: Based on the 2016 Survey on Financial Literacy and Financial Troubles

Abstract

We conducted "Survey on financial literacy and financial troubles" in September 2016. The survey asked a wide range of questions about financial troubles and financial literacy as well as financial and economic education experiences for 2,700 people. This paper analyzes the characteristics of people who suffer financial troubles from the viewpoint of financial literacy by using the results of this survey. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is pioneering as few papers quantitatively analyze how financial literacy is related to experiences of financial troubles. According to our results, we could not find a clear tendency that people with higher financial literacy are less likely to experience financial troubles. This unexpected result is because some types of financial troubles tend to be experienced by people with higher financial literacy. Conversely, we found financial troubles that people with low financial literacy tend to experience. Also, we found that many people have not experienced financial troubles so far, not because they are financially literate, but simply because they do not use various financial services.

Keywords

Financial education, Financial troubles, Financial literacy

Inquiries

Nobuyoshi YAMORI
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration
Kobe University
E-mail: yamori@rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp

Hitoe UEYAMA
Faculty of Economics, Nagoya Gakuin University