INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY IN TURKEY BASED ON EDUCATION

Abstract

The concept of intergenerational mobility refers to the association between parents’ and their children’s socio-economic well-being. As an interest and policy area, understanding the three aspects of intergenerational transmission stands out, i) social welfare ii) equality of opportunity, and iii) economic efficiency. First, it is essential to know how resources are allocated across generations because this allocation process may influence overall social welfare defined over the entire income distribution of different generations. Secondly, intergenerational mobility may be seen as a measure of equality of opportunity. Moreover, it can be one of the ways to reduce socioeconomic inequality by promoting social justice and achieving a more equitable allocation of resources (D'Addio, 2007). Although the studies of intergenerational transmission go back to the mid-19th century (Galton, 1869), it has been started to analyze and interpreted, more recently. From the 1960s, some empirical studies on economic, social and political determinants of mobility mostly in developed countries, such as the UK, USA, Canada and Sweden (Solon, 1999, 2002; Zimmerman, 1992; Black and Devereux, 2010; Bjorklund and Salvanes, 2011), are published, but for developing countries there are few works mostly due to data constraints and structural problems such as informal and household-based economic activities (Mercan, 2012, 2020; Emran & Shilpi, 2019, Demirtaş and Torul, 2023). In this direction, this study aims to contribute scarce literature on intergenerational mobility in Turkey by using the Adult Education Survey (AES) provided by TURKSTAT. Our results indicate a strong relationship between the socioeconomic status of the family and the socioeconomic status of the child, albeit decreasing over the birth cohorts. In addition to these results, persistence in terms of intergenerational mobility is higher for females with respect to males.

Keywords

• Intergenerational Mobility
• Education
• Human Capital

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