Intergenerational Mobility in India
Sam Asher, Paul Novosad, Charlie Rafkin
August 2021
Download the Paper
August 2021
Download the Paper
Does a child from a poor family have a chance of climbing the economic ladder?
Upward mobility is a measure of equality of opportunity. It describes the extent to which individuals born at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution can move up in the relative distribution. In a place with high upward mobility, your parents' social position does not fully determine your life outcomes. If upward mobility is high, people can improve their relative circumstances even if they start out poor.
Because of economic growth, people in India are much better off in real terms than they were a generation ago. But prospects for moving up the relative social ladder have not changed at all.
The average child born into a family at the 25th percentile can expect to be at the 37th percentile as an adult. This is low by international standards, and shows little improvement over time. Boys and girls born into families at the bottom of the distribution are just as likely to stay at the bottom today as they were in the 1950s.
Since 1960, upward mobility has risen substantially for members of Scheduled Castes, and declined for Muslims, who are now India’s least upwardly mobile group.
Place matters - a lot.
There is substantial local geographic variation in upward mobility. Our paper examines these geographic patterns and their correlates. View a national-level map of mobility here, and an interactive map of mobility in Delhi here.
