Education, Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality

Since the early seventies, both the proportion in a generation of tertiary education graduates and the educational level of the working population have substantially increased in all developed countries as well as in most of the emerging economies. However more education has not meant more equality and the general upgrading of skills has coincided with growing within-country income inequality. Over the same period, intergenerational persistence of inequality has remained high in a large number of countries, and the differences in intergenerational mobility have remained significant across countries. In addition, several works reveal that intergenerational mobility is very low at both ends of the income and education spectrum. This shows (i) that under-education and poverty traps could exist, and (ii) that the same families constitute the best paid and the most educated group from one generation to the next. In a number of countries, the combination of intergenerational persistence (i.e., the hierarchy of families is maintained over time) and growing income and educational within-generation differences tend to create inegalitarian dynamics with a high social- and family-related determination.