At the highest level, financial literacy around the world appears strongest in countries with developed and advanced economies, especially Western Europe and English-speaking countries. There are no countries in South America where more than 50% of people are financially literate and only one country in all of Africa.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear correlation between poverty and financial literacy. After all, there are many places with very few extremely poor people, like Russia and China, and yet these same places also have extremely low financial literacy rates. That means poor people aren’t necessarily financially illiterate, and neither are rich people.
But there’s no other place in the world with such wide-ranging differences in financial literacy as Europe. The continent is anchored by a group of high scoring countries in Scandinavia, most notably Norway and Sweden (both scoring 71%). In fact, northwestern European countries appear to perform the best on the Financial Literacy Survey, and the further south one looks, the worse the situation. Portugal manages a paulty 26%, the worst in all of Western Europe. The Eastern Bloc, meanwhile, has some obvious and staggering problems, with no country east or south of Hungary scoring over 50%.
In the first place is Denmark, with 71%, followed by Norway: 71% and Sweden: 71%.
Statistics show that 20 percent of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina is financially literate.
