Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Educational Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures How adult skills are configured? Rosario Scandurra a , Jorge Calero b a Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Department of Sociology, Edifici B3, C 08193, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain b University of Barcelona ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Literacy Education Skills OECD Structural equation model ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between family background, education, skills use and di- rect measures of literacy skills in five countries: the United States, Japan, Germany, Denmark and Spain. The main aim is to contribute to the research on skills acquisition by providing a com- prehensive analysis of literacy skills. We employ a structural equation modelling and use PIAAC data. Results show that skills are configured in a highly complex manner and that significant differences emerge across the five countries, reflecting their historical and institutional char- acteristics. Intergenerational transmission of educational inequality is a crucial factor in shaping skills outcomes, although this factor varies considerably between countries. The effects of family background, educational attainment, and skills use in daily life on literacy respond to country specific equilibria. 1. Introduction High income countries stress the importance of upgrading skills levels for their economic competitiveness, a process in which the individual is not simply one more factor in the production line, but the primary source of value added (Reich 1992). In today’s economy, a skilled workforce constitutes a critical component of a country’s economic performance. However, whilst the links between skills and the macro economy have been widely studied (Barro & Sala-i-Martin, 1995; Manuelli & Seshadri, 2000), a thorough understanding of how skills are actually formed is only now beginning to emerge. As such, the objective of this paper is to show how literacy skills are configured by employing a comprehensive framework that compares the experiences of five countries. Extensive literature from the sociology and economics of education (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2011; Van de Werfhorst and Mijs, 2010) show that individual chances of skill formation are strongly affected by social background, and that educational institutions and policies are not neutral in this respect. Indeed, there is considerable evidence indicating that the countries’ historical and institutional equilibria have an effect on their economic and social performances. Research in comparative education has also shown that education and training systems form part of these complex institutional designs, which are closely linked to state formation and the basic idea of citizenship. As such, these elements shape divergent educational and social outcomes (Brown, 2013; Dupriez et al., 2008; Green, 2013). The institutional characteristics of education and training respond to social and economic processes and, to some extent, condition their evolution in the long run. Recently, a growing literature has concluded that the formation of skills and their availability is strongly conditioned and reflected by context-specific political economy equilibria (Busemeyer & Trampusch, 2012; Morel et al., 2012; Solga 2014). Dimensions such as levels of stratification or standardisation, degrees of access and accessibility, levels of state control and expenditure have been used to devise different typologies of education systems (Allmendinger & Leibfried, 2003; Busemeyer, 2015; Janmaat & Green, 2013). Overall, these studies have concerned themselves with what constitutes an ef- fective institutional architecture for education and training provision, focusing on macro institutional differentiation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.06.004 Received 12 November 2018; Received in revised form 13 March 2019; Accepted 10 June 2019 E-mail address: rosario.scandurra@uab.cat (R. Scandurra). International Journal of Educational Research xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0883-0355/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Rosario Scandurra and Jorge Calero, International Journal of Educational Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.06.004