Financial Literacy Education

This book explores the issue of consumer financial education, responding to increased interest in, and calls to improve peoples’ financial literacy skills and abilities to understand and manage their money. New conceptual frameworks introduced in the book offer academic audiences an innovative way of thinking about the project on financial literacy education. Using the concepts of ‘edu-regulation’ and ‘financial knowledge democratisation’ to analyse the financial education project in the UK, the book exposes serious, and often ignored, limitations to using information and education as tools for consumer protection. It challenges the mainstream representation of financial literacy education as a viable solution to consumer financial exclusion and poverty. Instead, it argues that the project on financial literacy education fails to acknowledge important dependences between consumer financial behaviour and the socio-economic, political, and cultural context within which consumers live. Finally, it reveals how these international and national calls for ever greater financial education oversimplify and underestimate the complexity of consumer financial decision-making in our modern times.

Asta Zokaityte, PhD, is a lecturer at Kent Law School, UK, where she teaches commercial law. Her research interests lie in the areas of financial services regulation, consumer protection, law and development, gender, and socio-legal studies. She has years of professional legal experience having worked as a lawyer in Lithuania, where she advised corporate clients across different fields of practice, including but not limited to: consumer credit, capital markets and securities law, corporate restructuring and insolvency. Asta Zokaityte has published her work in international journals.