associated with greater equality of opportunity, which is the extent to which people’s life achievements are affected by circumstances they are born into, such as parental education and income, race, gender, and birthplace. Both types of mobility are important for economic progress and for sustaining a social contract that addresses the aspirations of society, which is critical for social cohesion. Without absolute mobility, living standards cannot improve; while a lack of relative mobility is deeply unfair and perpetuates inequality across generations. Empirical evidence suggests that lower relative mobility is associated with higher income inequality, likely due to a two-way relationship whereby inequality of opportunity is both a cause and consequence of income inequality. Low relative mobility can also be harmful to long-term economic growth because of wasted human potential that leads to lower levels of human capital accumulation, and misallocation of resources, relative to what would have occurred with greater equality of opportunity.<sup>2</sup> While a few recent studies have examined the implications of school closures on learning outcomes and dropout rates (see Moscoviz and Evans (2022) for a summary of available evidence), we are only aware of a single study so far by Neidhofer et al. (2021) that examines the impact of school closures on inter-generational mobility for a set of 17 Latin American countries. They conclude that in the LAC region the inter-generational persistence in education could increase by 7 percent on account of the pandemic. The contribution of this paper to the literature on COVID-19 and inequality is thus two-fold. First, we estimate the impacts of school closures on educational persistence for a larger set of developing countries across several regions of the world, which enables us to study the heterogeneity of implications of school closures for mobility across different parts of the world. Second, unlike Neidhofer et al. (2021), which is based on pre-pandemic survey data and relies on assumptions of pandemic learning modalities based on policies deployed by different countries and certain household characteristics, we are able to draw from some observed data from the World Bank’s high-frequency phone surveys on what types of learning (if any) children from different types of households are reported to have engaged in during periods of school closures, and the latest learning-loss simulation scenarios from Azevedo et al (2022) which now include observed actual school closure data from the <u>UNESCO school closures tracker.</u> The main findings of the paper are that the learning losses associated with the extensive school closures around the world due to COVID-19 are likely to translate into economically significant reductions in both absolute and relative educational mobility across generations. We estimate that in high-income and in upper middleincome countries the average share of children with more years of education than their parents would decline by 8-9 percentage points, with smaller average declines estimated for low-income countries. The results imply that the impact of the learning losses associated with the pandemic would worsen the pre-existing trend of declining absolute mobility in Upper-Middle Income (henceforth, UMIC) and High-Income (HIC) groups of countries, and reverse the improvements in absolute mobility for Low-Income (LIC) and Lower-Middle Income (LMIC) country groups.<sup>3</sup> Among developing regions, Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) is estimated to have the largest decline in absolute mobility, followed by the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region.

Furthermore, the ability of children to engage in continued learning during periods of school closures was not uniform, with children from households with lower socio-economic status having a higher incidence of not engaging in learning during periods of school closures. Estimates of learning losses based on HFPS data that account for differential learning engagement across population groups show that _relative_ intergenerational mobility, measured by the correlation coefficient between parents’ and children’s education (which are not impacted when educational losses are assumed to be uniform) may have declined by almost 4 percent on average, depending on the assumptions about the effectiveness of pandemic learning. The magnitudes of the

> 2 See Narayan et al (2018), Chapter 1 and Van Der Weide et al (2021) for a review of the theory and evidence on the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility, and between economic growth and intergenerational mobility.

> 3 The country groups by both income and region are as defined by World Bank Group.

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