“There’s been a shift, from risk being held centrally, to risk being held by individuals,” said Mark Fiander, a director at Money Advice Services, an independent agency created by the British government in 2010 giving citizens free advice on financial matters and debt reduction.

Like other financial experts, Mr. Fiander warns that many adults are having a difficult time keeping their financial affairs in order. “Even in the good times, certainly in the U.K., you have about a third of people who struggle to make it to the end of month without running out of money,” he said.

In response, countries have developed different ways to improve financial literacy, competency or behavior — the terms vary — among the young. Some focus on training teachers, others on providing curriculum material, making the subject accessible through mobile apps, or focusing on specific events, such as a national financial literacy week.

Flore-Anne Messy, a senior policy expert at the O.E.C.D.’s International Network on Financial Education, who was closely involved with the design of the financial literacy portion of the PISA study, explained that besides national strategies for better financial literacy, the impetus of different global players to train their young varied. Citing the example of the Czech Republic, which did particularly well in the study, Ms. Messy said: “When they moved from communism to capitalism, they needed to train the new generation, because they knew that the welfare system is changing.”

The newest financial literacy portion of PISA tested approximately 29,000 15-year-olds in Australia; the Flemish community of Belgium; Shanghai; Colombia; Croatia; the Czech Republic; Estonia; France; Israel; Italy; Latvia; New Zealand; Poland; Russia; Slovakia; Slovenia; Spain; and the United States, representing that age group in 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.

There were five levels of difficulty in the test, which was taken by students in 2012. The results, published this month first in Paris and then in Washington and other partner countries around the world, varied widely across countries.

Shanghai, Flemish Belgium and Estonia scored best when it came to the overall PISA score. But students in Australia, New Zealand and the Czech Republic had the best financial sense compared with their scores in other PISA subjects.