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In this episode of the AEI Events Podcast, AEI’s Aparna Mathur moderates a discussion between the World Bank’s Ambar Narayan and a panel of experts on the World Bank’s new report “Fair Progress? Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World.” The report analyzes how economic mobility has changed over time and covers 96 percent of the world’s population.
Dr. Narayan explains that higher absolute mobility means a higher share of children in a particular birth cohort are more educated than their parents. Relative mobility reflects an individual’s chance of succeeding regardless of their economic situation at birth. The World Bank concludes that developing economies lag behind high-income countries in terms of mobility and that this gap widens over time.
The panelists discusses the database’s importance and limitations. AEI’s Eric A. Hanushek frames the debate in the context of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and calls for measuring and improving education, which the report did not address. The Brookings Institution’s John McArthur remarks that the database is likely the start of a greater effort to initiate research on intergenerational mobility. The Joint Economic Committee’s Scott Winship adds that absolute mobility should be a secondary indicator and that this database should be examined alongside income levels to understand global economic growth.
This event took place on July 23, 2018.
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