A New and Easy-to-Use Measure of Literacy, Its Axiomatic Properties and an Application1

Abstract. It can be argued that just as there are different kinds of lit-eracy, there are different kinds of illiteracy. A ‘proximate illiterate, ’ i.e. an illiterate who has easy access to a literate person, is clearly better off than someone without such access. The existing literature that takes account of these differences (1) defines an illiterate person to be a proximate illiterate if he or she lives in a household with at least one literate person and (2) derives new measures of literacy which typically exceed the standard liter-acy rate. The latter risks generating policy complacency. The aim of this paper is to suggest a measure of literacy that is not limited by (1) and (2). The measure is axiomatically characterized and its use is illustrated with a numerical exercise for the provinces of South Africa