# (1) Introduction

A vast literature on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity in economics and sociology focuses on the role of family and neighborhood background in shaping the life chances of a child.<sup>2</sup> This literature, however, primarily concentrates on developed countries, and the evidence base on developing countries remains relatively sparse. There has been a spurt in the interests among development economists in understanding the geography and evolution of intergenerational mobility in the recent years, partly spurred by the evidence of increasing inequality in the 1980s and 1990s in many developing countries (World Bank (2006), Chancel et al. (2022)).<sup>3</sup> Among the policymakers, there has been an increasing emphasis on inequality of opportunity as opposed to inequality of outcome.<sup>4</sup> The observed increase in cross-sectional inequality in socioeconomic outcomes is of serious concern when it reects increasing inequality of opportunity and declining intergenerational mobility.

It is, however, dicult to build a credible and comparable cross-country evidence base on intergenerational mobility in developing countries because of data limitations. Two essential building blocks are required for such an analysis: a measure of socioeconomic status of children and parents, and a measure of intergenerational mobility or inequality of economic opportunity.<sup>5</sup> Permanent income has been the preferred measure of socioeconomic status in the economic literature on developed countries, but reliable panel data for a long enough period to estimate permanent income remain scarce in developing countries.<sup>6</sup> In the absence of income data, it is feasible to use education data across a large number of developing countries,

> 2For recent surveys of the economic literature see, Black and Devereux (2011), Bjorklund and Salvanes (2011), Solon (1999), Heckman and Mosso (2014), Mogstad and Torsvik (2021). For surveys of the sociology literature see Breen (2010) and Torche (2015a).

> 3The focus on geography of intergenerational mobility also reects the inuential work of Chetty et al. (2014) which constructed an opportunity atlas with estimates of absolute mobility at the zip code level in the United States.

> 4For example, German President Joachim Gauck declared equality of opportunity as the normative policy goal during his inauguration in 2012. US president Barack Obama in his 2014 state of the union address mentioned opportunity 10 times.

> 5It has been increasingly emphasized in the literature that intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity are closely related, and they focus on the same fundamental question, even though these two strands of the literature developed independently. For discussions, see Bjorklund and Jantti (2020) and Emran and Shilpi (2021).

> 6There are other diculties in measuring household and individual income in a developing country. First, because of large informal home-based economic activities, it is dicult to measure income. Second, It is dicult to measure individual income in an extended family living and eating together in the same household. For a discussion on this point, see Iversen et al. (2019).

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