Development and Exclusion: Intergenerational Stickiness in India

Rajarshi Majumder and Jhilam Ray ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The concept of development has matured from being indicative of aggregative progress to being sensitive to inequality and exclusion within the whole, giving rise to the coinage Inclusive Development. This notion speaks of bridging gap between ethnic/social groups within a nation in domains like livelihood, social status, political empowerment, cultural freedom, among others. This would depend on temporal movement of different groups and intergenerational mobility can act as a mechanism to achieve social fluidity and greater inclusion. Present paper explores the role of intergenerational stickiness in perpetuating such disparity across social groups in India. We argue that economic status is intricately linked to what a person does for livelihood, i.e. her occupation, and what remuneration she receives for it, i.e. her wages. In present world system, occupation and wages are also critically determined by the human capital quotient of the individual, marked generally by her educational level. Therefore, the socioeconomic structure of a country and its temporal movement would be shaped by intergenerational mobility in education, occupation and income for different social groups. Higher (upward) mobility for the lagging classes would lead to catching up and convergence while lower mobility for them would lead to widening gaps. It is our contention that persistence of economic inequality across social groups in India is associated with high parental impact and low intergenerational mobility for the historically lagging and excluded social groups. Technically both Transitional Matrix and Regression based econometric techniques are used to estimate parental impact on respondent’s status as well as the role of social background in influencing the magnitude of the parental impact itself in Indian context during the last two decades. Relative strength of Structural and Exchange Mobility have also been estimated. Interlinkage between the three types of mobility and that between mobility and other socioeconomic parameters have been explored.

Keywords: Intergenerational Mobility; Social Exclusion; Transition Matrix; Poverty; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I25 I28 I30 J24 J31 J62 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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