THE PLACE OF FINANCIAL LITERACY IN THE NATIONAL ECONOMY AND DETERMINING FINANCIAL LITERACY LEVEL: AN APPLICATION OF BURSA PROVINCE

Today, new financial products and services are being offered to the market continuously and complex options are created for both investments and savings. So this situation, leads to people that have insufficient financial information, making financial mistakes. The financial mistake chain of individuals is also spreading over the whole economy and the country s economy is suffering. Therefore, the concept of financial literacy, which means that individuals can make informed, efficient and reliable decisions in financial matters, is a matter that should be given importance at macro level. The main objective of this study, which is prepared in line with this importance, is to measure the level of basic financial literacy in our country and evaluate the proposals for its development. For this purpose, survey method was applied as a method in the study and the findings were analyzed with the SPSS package program. Consequently it was concluded that the basic level of financial literacy in Bursa proved to be sufficient but further improvement of financial literacy would be beneficial. In addition, it was seen that the respondents attach importance to debt management, saving and retirement issues but were not interested in investing. When the demographics of the participants in the survey were examined, it was found that the gender gap did not have a significant effect but while education level increased the financial literacy also increased, on the contrary while age level increased the financial literacy decreased.