People with more financial literacy are less economically fragile — this matters for aggregate shocks from pandemics to climate change: Annamaria Lusardi

Drawing from our data, these are mostly the Nordic countries, Canada and the UK. They have a strong educational system and do well in financial literacy. This does matter — studying microdata across countries, we’ve found people with greater financial literacy are less economically fragile or more able to face shocks. This is particularly important in an era when we face not just normal distur-bances but shocks at an aggregate level, like the pandemic or climate change, says Annamaria Lusardi.