Inequalities between socio-demographic groups also play a key role in academic outcomes. Segregation and low social mixing can therefore reinforce inequality of opportunity. Students' performance tends to be worse in schools where most students come from disadvantaged backgrounds – regardless of their own parents’ socio-economic standing. Fifteen-year-olds with parents in the top 25% in terms of socio-economic standing, for example, tend to score better in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) than those whose parents belong to the bottom 25%.īeyond family circumstances, the school environment is central to academic achievement. When it comes to education, disparities rooted in socio-economic status widen throughout a student's life and are already evident by adolescence. So how can we promote equality of opportunity? Read on to learn about the policies that can make a difference. People who are most concerned about their chances in life are also less happy and feel less represented in politics. Around 65% of working-age OECD citizens worry they won't be as financially secure as their parents an almost equal share fear their children will be even less secure. Most people perceive that social mobility is limited: on average, OECD citizens believe that six out of 10 poor children will remain poor as adults. Unequal opportunities are not only a moral concern, they also undermine economic and social prosperity. Across OECD countries, it takes nearly five generations for children from low-income families to approach the average income in their country. In European OECD countries, children with the greatest socio-economic disadvantage grow up to earn as much as 20% less as adults than those with more favourable childhoods. The project centrally addresses SDG 10, especially how to ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome.People from disadvantaged backgrounds have fewer opportunities to climb the socio-economic ladder. UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 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. 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?Īll papers, data, opinion pieces and opportunities to engage relating to this project will be available on this web page. How does one reliably identify the drivers and the inhibitors of social mobility in particular developing country contexts? 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 assess the extent of social mobility in a given development context when the datasets required by conventional measurement techniques are limited in availability? 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. 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.Ĭoncerns 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. 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.
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