Examination of intergenerational occupational mobility among Indian women

Abstract: A child’s access to health care and minimum nutrition should not depend on circumstances such as caste, religion, gender, place of birth, or other parental characteristics, which are beyond the control of a child. This paper uses two rounds of Indian National Family Health Surveys and concepts of Inequality of Opportunity and Human Opportunity Indices to measure inequality arising out of unequal access to full immunization and minimum nutrition for Indian children. The results suggest overall high level of inequality of opportunity with substantial geographical variations. Changes in inequality of opportunity in the two services during 1992-93 to 2005-06 were mixed with some geographical regions outperforming others. The findings also call for substantial policy revisions if the goal of universal access to full immunization and minimum nutrition has to be achieved.

Abstract: The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution.

Abstract: Inequality of opportunity (IOp) in any society is defined as that part of overall inequality which arises from factors beyond the control of an individual (circumstances) such as parental education, caste, gender, religion etc. and is thus considered unfair and is against the meritocratic values of a society. Hence, it needs to be controlled and compensated. We estimate the IOp in economic outcomes among Indian women by using the nationally representative India Human Development Survey 2011–2012. We include parental education, caste, religion and region of birth as circumstances. The overall IOp in income ranges from 18–25% and 16–21% (of total income inequality) in urban and rural areas, respectively. The corresponding figures for consumption expenditure are 16–22% and 20–23% in urban and rural areas, respectively. We also estimate the partial contributions of the circumstances to the overall IOp. We find that the parental education is the most significant contributor to IOp in urban areas, whereas, region of birth is the most significant contributor to IOp in rural areas. Fortunately, findings imply that socially and culturally imbedded factors like caste and religion which are more persistent do contribute to the IOp, but, the largest contribution is due to factors like parental education and region which can be relatively easily tackled and addressed with policy interventions.

Abstract: A few studies in India have related daughters’ education to their fathers, but there is little to no evidence when it comes to the intergenerational relation between daughters and mothers’ education. Using India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2011–2012, the purpose of this paper is to investigate intergenerational educational mobility among women (15–49 years) (vis-a-vis their mothers) for all India.,The study uses transition/mobility matrices and multiple mobility measures for the examination of intergenerational educational mobility among women (15–49 years) in India. The data have been taken from the “India Human Development Survey 2011-12.”,Findings indicate that intergenerational educational mobility at the all-India level is about 0.69, that is, 69 percent of the women acquire a level of education different from their mothers. Of the overall mobility, about 80 percent is contributed by upward mobility whereas the rest is downward. Mobility is greater in urban areas and is highest among the socially advantaged “Others” (or upper) caste group. Also, the upward component is substantially lower for socially disadvantaged groups compared to others. Further, there are large inter-regional variations, with the situation being worst in the central and eastern states such as Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, etc. Moreover, mobility (overall and upward) increases consistently as one moves up the income distribution.,This study is perhaps the first study which comprehensively studies intergenerational educational mobility for women (15–49 years) at an all-India level. Findings not only capture the mobility at the aggregate level but also for different caste groups as well as regional variations and income effect.

Abstract: If household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand. With survey data on family health and nutrition in Brazil, the equality of parental income effects is rejected. Unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family's health than income under the control of a father; for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger. The common preference (or neoclassical) model of the household is rejected. If unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same; equality of the ratios cannot be rejected. There is also evidence for gender preference: mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters, fathers to sons.

Abstract: The modern formulation of equality of opportunity emerges from discussions in political philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century beginning with Rawls (1971) and Dworkin, 1981a , Dworkin, 1981b . Equality of opportunity exists when policies compensate individuals with disadvantageous circumstances so that outcomes experienced by a population depend only on factors for which persons can be considered to be responsible. Importantly, inequality of opportunity for income exists when individuals’ incomes are in some important part determined by the educational achievement and income of the families that raised them. We review the philosophical debates referred to, commenting upon them from an economist's viewpoint. We propose several ways of modeling equality (or inequality) of opportunity, pointing out that an equal-opportunity ethic implies a non-welfarist way of ranking social outcomes. We propose that economic development should be conceived of as the equalization of opportunities for income in a country. We consider equalization of opportunity from a dynamic viewpoint, and we review popular attitudes with regard to distributive justice, showing that there is substantial popular support for an equal-opportunity ethic. We discuss the empirical issues that emerge in measuring inequality of opportunity and provide a review of the empirical literature that measures degrees of inequality of opportunity for the achievement of various objectives, in various countries.

Abstract: This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for computing policies which equalize opportunities, or, more generally, ways of ordering social policies with respect to their efficacy in opportunity equalization (sections 3, 4 and 5), apply the approach to the conceptualization of economic development (section 6), discuss dynamic issues (section 7), give a preamble to a discussion of empirical work (section 8), provide evidence of population views from surveys and experiments concerning conceptions of equality (section 9), and a discuss measurement issues, summarizing the empirical literature on inequality of opportunity to date (section 10). We conclude with mention of some critiques of the equal-opportunity approach, and some predictions (section 11).

Abstract: The usual indices of inequality are derived from observations on income, wealth etc. corresponding to a particular point or period of time, It has been frequently argued that inequality values by themselves do not accurately reflect the differences between individuals, since the true situation depends to a large extent on how the relative positions of individuals vary over time. Thus, it has been argued, “static” measures of inequality should be supplemented by “dynamic” measures of changes through time, which we shall call measures of mobility. Studies which have proposed ways of quantifying these dynamic changes broadly fall into two categories: those which use elementary statistics, such as the correlation coefficient; and those which make more sophisticated suggestions based on transition matrices and other simple stochastic specifications of dynamic processes. Shorrocks [9] provides a number of references and discusses some of the issues involved in deriving an index of mobility from transition matrices. Particular consideration is given to the interval of time between observations, since a relationship is expected between the amount of observed movement and the length of time over which movement can take place; in a short space of time there is little opportunity for movement, even if the society is inherently very mobile. These earlier attempts to define an index of mobility are mainly concerned with stock variables, interpreted in a wide sense to include social status and occupation as well as wealth and the assets of firms. Once attention is turned to flow variables, such as income, it becomes apparent that there is another important consideration. Observed variations in income depend not only on the interval between observations, but also on the length of the accounting period chosen for incomes. Data availability and custom dictate that the period selected is normally one year, although shorter intervals, a week or a month, are occasionally used. If the accounting period were extended from, say, one month to one year, variations in monthly incomes (previously classified as dynamic changes) become subsumed within the annual income figure. Some of the dynamic changes are therefore incorporated in the static inequality value, and the distinction between the static and dynamic aspects becomes very blurred. Similarly, as we pass from annual to lifetime income inequality, intra-lifetime income mobility is lost in the process of aggregation. However, the effects of income variations over time do not disappear altogether: they are reflected in the changes recorded in the inequality value. Those occupying the highest and lowest positions in the income hierarchy rarely remain there forever. So the aggregation of incomes over time tends to improve the relative position of those temporarily found at the bottom of the distribution, and the situation of those at the top tends to deteriorate. For this reason it is commonly supposed that inequality falls as the accounting period is lengthened. Empirical confirmation of this relationship requires longitudinal income data samples, of which very few exist. However, the little evidence available agrees with expectati0ns.l For example, Soltow [l0] traced the annual incomes of a sample of Norwegians over the period 1928-l960. The Gini coefficient for the 33 years combined was 0.134 compared to an average value of 0.183 for the separate years. Using US data, Kohen et al. [3] found that the Gini coefficient for family income and earnings of young men (aged 16-24) fell by 4.7-7.4 “/,, when cumulated over two years, and by 9.2-10.8 % when cumulated over three. For middle-aged men (4559 years old), aggregating incomes over two years caused the Gini to decline by about 4 %.” There are reasonable grounds, therefore, for supposing that the existence of mobility causes inequality to decline as the accounting interval grows. Furthermore, intuition suggests that the extent to which inequality declines will be directly related to the frequency and magnitude of relative income variations. If the income structure exhibits little mobility, relative incomes will be left more or less unaltered over time and there will be no pronounced egalitarian trend as the measurement period increases. In contrast, inequality may be expected to decrease significantly in a very (income) mobile society. The main purpose is to exploit this relationship between mobility and inequality, to derive an index of mobility for flow variables. In essence, mobility is measured by the extent to which the income distribution is equalized as the accounting period is extended. Defining Mobility as the complement of rigidity, as much as we define equality as the complement of inequality. For inequality measures with the desirable properties.