What does a person need to compete successfully in a marketplace which increasingly requires technological know-how and high-level skills? And what can national policies do to cultivate a highly skilled, educated, and literate workforce? What does it mean to be literate? And how can literacy be measured? This book defines and presents the results of tests for three types of literacy: {prose } {literacy}, the skills and know-how needed to understand texts found in daily life; {document literacy}, the ability to respond to written information contained in materials like job applications, transportation schedules, maps, tables and graphs; and {quantitative literacy}, the skills required for daily arithmetic operations like balancing chequebooks. This is a landmark demonstration of the intersection between literacy skills and national economic performance. The richly nuanced skill profiles of adult populations in the seven countries covered show substantial differences in both distribution and overall performance level. As OECD countries continue to evolve into post-industrial societies, strategies to build literacy skills, as part of broader strategies for lifelong learning, are pivotal for developing comparative national advantage.