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Improving early child development outcomes in low-income settingsImproving early child development outcomes in low-income settings requires affordable, sustainable, and easily scalable solutions. The “First Steps”...
This project looks at what we know about social mobility in developing countries, and works to conceptualize and innovate methodology to further research on this topic.
Social mobility — defined as the ability to move from a lower to a higher level of education or occupational status, or from a lower to a higher social class or income-group — is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society.
Concerns about rising inequality have engendered a renewed interest in social mobility, especially in the developing world, as reflected in recent authoritative reports from the OECD and the World Bank. However, efforts to construct the databases in developing countries and meet the standards required for conventional analyses of social mobility are, still, at a preliminary stage and need to be complemented by innovative conceptual and methodological advances to convincingly study a phenomenon of great contemporary importance.
Key questions
- How does one assess the extent of social mobility in a given development context when the datasets required by conventional measurement techniques are limited in availability?
- What do we know about the patterns of social mobility across the developing world? Which countries have done particularly well in social mobility and which countries have lagged behind?
- How does one reliably identify the drivers and the inhibitors of social mobility in particular developing country contexts?
- How does one acquire the knowledge required to design interventions that are likely to raise social mobility, either by increasing upward mobility or by lowering downward mobility?
Watch this space
All papers, data, opinion pieces and opportunities to engage relating to this project will be available on this web page. An important initial outcome of the project will be a state-of-the-art monograph on concepts, measures and determinants of social mobility in developing countries, with contributions from leading scholars in economics, anthropology, sociology, economic history and political science.
UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
The project centrally addresses SDG 10, especially how to ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome.
TEAM
Focal point: Kunal Sen and Maria Lo Bue
External focal points: Anirudh Krishna and Vegard Iversen
Project support: Tram Nguyen
Communications: Timothy Shipp
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Working Paper
Degrees of disadvantageThis study is positioned in two strands of literature—intersectionality and social mobility. It is the first to measure (dis)advantage at the individual level as an outcome of the intersectionality of identities and parental circumstances. By linking...
Working Paper
Barriers or catalysts? Traditional institutions and social mobility in rural IndiaWe examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and...
Journal Article
Improving parenting practices for early child developmentThis study investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development program targeting parents of children aged 6–24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. This low-intensity, short-duration, and low-cost...
Journal Article
Multigenerational mobility among males in IndiaMost studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility...
Blog
Social mobility among disadvantaged groups in IndiaIn recent decades, India has experienced rapid economic growth alongside radical affirmative action programs enacted since independence. This column...
Working Paper
Foreign aid and intergenerational mobility in AfricaWhile there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of...
Blog
Reducing inequality — the great challenge of our time
Early in October 2022, international and Colombian researchers gathered together for three days at the UNIANDES campus, located at the foot of the...
Blog
Report from the WIDER Development Conference on reducing inequality
For several decades, UNU-WIDER has actively worked on pathfinding and groundbreaking research on inequalities. We host one of the most extensive...
Blog
Urban poverty: cities, slums, and the need for policy actionDeveloping countries will be predominantly urban by 2030. While urbanization is historically associated with development and broad-based social...
Research Brief
Three key insights for research on social mobility in developing countriesThe volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods, and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from a range of social science disciplines working on a variety of issues related to social mobility. Three motivations guide...
Blog
Advancing social mobility research: Where to start
Innovation in academic investigation and policy response is critical to addressing global challenges. That is why the most recent Nobel Prize in...
Journal Article
Decomposing learning inequalities in East AfricaInequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household- and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might...
Working Paper
Whose intergenerational mobility?Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents...
Blog
Dual learning disadvantages in East Africa: And how to deal with them
Children from poorer families in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda face a double disadvantage in their opportunity to access learning: not only is the...
Research Brief
What do we need to know about social mobility in the Global South?The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from several disciplines to advance research practice on social mobility. Three sets of motivations guide this joint effort...
Policy Brief
Six sets of policy actions to promote social mobilityPromoting social mobility is an essential task of development, and a multi-faceted one. Precarious livelihoods are widespread. Containing downward mobility is an important precondition for sustaining upward mobility. Policies of human capital...
Working Paper
Childbirth and women’s labour market transitions in India (revised)The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’...
Working Paper
Climate shocks, agriculture, and migration in NepalClimate change is expected to increase the risk in agricultural production due to increasing temperatures and rainfall variability. Smallholders can adjust by diversifying income sources, including through migration. Most existing studies investigate...
Blog
Grandads, dads, and sons: Examining multigenerational mobility in IndiaWhile studies have examined the association in socioeconomic status between parent and offspring, there has been relatively little research on...
Working Paper
Childbirth and women's labour market transitions in IndiaThe impact of childbirth on the labour market participation of women has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries, constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and earnings being characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty...
Working Paper
Dynastic measures of inter-generational mobility with empirical evidence from IndonesiaWe suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility in occupational choicesHistorically, the issue of intergenerational evolution of income, wealth, and socioeconomic status has been the subject of considerable research in the analysis of inequality. Such intergenerational linkages are anticipated to come from two sources...
Working Paper
Multigenerational mobility in IndiaMost studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—that is, status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational...
Journal Article
Migrating out of mega-citiesTraditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this article, the author shows that in Brazil as...
Journal Article
The individual poverty incidence of growthThe canonical approach to analyse the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools endorsing this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamic in the population...
Blog
Changing the lives of very young children: Evidence from RwandaGlobally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...
Working Paper
Is there a gender bias in intergenerational mobility?We examine the intergenerational mobility of women relative to men, using paired mother-daughter and father-son data on occupation and education for Cameroon. We find that both in occupation and education, intergenerational mobility is higher for...
Journal Article
Educational opportunities in IndonesiaNot all sources of inequality in educational achievements are fair. But how strong and persistent is the burden of unequal opportunities that each person carries on in their life? In this paper, we define individual indices of the burden of...
Working Paper
Improving parenting practices for early child developmentThis paper investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development programme targeting parents of children aged six to 24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. The programme engaged parents through...
Working Paper
Measuring social mobility rates in earlier and less-documented societiesIn societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This paper explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and...
Working Paper
Measuring multidimensional inequality of opportunityThis paper develops a normative approach to the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in a multidimensional setting—that is, when the individual outcome is represented by a multidimensional variable. We characterize three classes of social...
Working Paper
What’s behind pro-poor growth?Standard growth incidence curves describe how growth episodes impact on the overall income distribution. However, measuring the pro-poorness of the growth process is complex due to (i) measurement errors and (ii) effect shocks that may hit the...
Working Paper
The ethnographic approach to social mobilityThe ethnographic approach has much to contribute to our understanding of social mobility.This paper provides a discussion on ethnography as a method and approach to writing and description, and reviews some ways in which themes related to social...
Working Paper
Can ‘good’ social mobility news be ‘bad’ and vice versa?Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three...
Working Paper
Social mobility and inequality between groupsThe relationship between social mobility and inequality is well studied in the literature, but far greater attention has been paid to ‘vertical’ than to ‘horizontal’ inequality. This paper focuses on mobility and horizontal inequality between ethnic...
Working Paper
Income mobility in the developing worldThis paper examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels...
Working Paper
Drivers of mobilityEmpirical studies in developing countries tend to find higher levels of socioeconomic persistence across generations compared with those of high-income economies. However, there have been relatively few advances in the identification of the drivers...
Working Paper
Social mobility in ChinaThis study analyses intergenerational class mobility in China as a case study of a quantitative sociological approach to social mobility research in the Global South. Drawing on national representative surveys collected between 2010 and 2015 in China...
Working Paper
Social networks, role models, peer effects, and aspirationsWe review the literature on pathways through which social networks may influence social mobility in developing countries. We find that social networks support members in tangible ways—via access to opportunities for migration, credit, trading...
Working Paper
Migrants leaving mega-citiesTraditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this paper I show that in Brazil as many people...
Working Paper
Does sorting matter for learning inequality?Inequalities in children’s learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household- and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how...
Working Paper
Gender and social mobilityWomen have historically been overlooked in research on social mobility. In contrast, new research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes and norms as determinants of women’s labour force participation in industrialized...
Working Paper
Concepts of social mobilityThis paper has two purposes. The first is to define clearly different social mobility concepts and components. The second is to embed these concepts and components into a larger context of social mobility research. The core of the paper develops six...
Working Paper
Will urbanization raise social mobility in the South, replicating the economic history of the West?As developing countries rapidly urbanize, the number of people living in ‘slums’—neighbourhoods lacking property rights and basic services—continues to increase. Whether slum residents will ultimately share in the benefits of the cities they help...
Working Paper
Structural poverty dynamics in urban South AfricaThis paper examines the extent and determinants of structural poverty dynamics in South Africa, focusing on the socio-economically disadvantaged urban African population. The quantitative analysis using panel data is triangulated with evidence from a...
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Theme: 2019-23, Transforming societies