Educational Mobility in the Developing World

This chapter reviews the small but growing literature on intergenerational educational mobility in the developing world. Education is a critical determinant of economic wellbeing, and it predicts a range of nonpecuniary outcomes such as marriage, fertility, health, crime, and political attitudes. We show that developing nations feature stronger intergenerational educational persistence than high-income countries, in spite of substantial educational expansion in the last decades. We consider variations in mobility across gender and region, and discuss the macro-level correlates of educational mobility in developing countries. The chapter also discusses the literatures on concepts and measurement of educational mobility, theoretical perspectives to understand educational mobility across generations, and the role that education plays in the economic mobility process, and it applies these literatures to understand educational mobility in the developing world.