An in-depth look at the latest data (for the year 2018) shows that this dismal performance is largely the result of the delays in Italy’s Mezzogiorno: while the North-West and the North-East of the country perform above the OECD average, the South and the Islands fall worryingly below (slide 7). 16. These gaps translate into analogous gaps for Italian adults.
The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) carried out by the OECD between 2013 and 2016 indicates that, at each age cluster, Italian adults perform invariably worse than the average adult in the OECD (slide 8).