COVID-19 School Closures, Learning Losses and Intergenerational Mobility

The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications ofCOVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgroundsto engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility ineducation. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specificresults of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence andquality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Basedon this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absoluteand relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates ofCOVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely tohave a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence ofremedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than theirparents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the LatinAmerica region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children fromhouseholds of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant declinein relative educational mobility.