A Tale of Two Transitions: Mobility Dynamics in China and Russia after Central Planning

Kristina Butaeva, Lian Chen, Steven Durlauf and Albert Park

No 34124, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines intergenerational mobility in China and Russia during their transitions from central planning to market systems. We consider mobility as movement captured by changes in status between parents and children. We provide estimates of overall mobility, which involves mobility during transition to a system's steady state, as well as steady state mobility, which captures long-run mobility independent of transitional dynamics or shifts in the marginal distribution of outcomes across generations. We further decompose overall mobility into structural and exchange components. We find that China exhibits more overall educational mobility than Russia mostly due to greater structural mobility, while Russia exhibits greater steady state educational mobility. In contrast, both the overall and steady state occupational mobility is similar in China and Russia. Comparing these results to the US, we find that steady state mobility in education is substantially higher in the US and Russia compared to China, but occupational steady state mobility is comparable in all three countries.

JEL-codes: I24 J62 P2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-cna, nep-edu and nep-lab
Note: ED EFG LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34124.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34124

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34124
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().