The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative inter-generational educational mobility. This is a direct result of the uneven distribution of learning losses, in both absolute and relative terms within countries. For example, children with parents who have less than primary education are, under certain assumptions, estimated to experience almost double the average absolute loss in years of education relative to pre-pandemic levels compared to children of parents with tertiary education. This is driven by differences in extent and type of learning engagement of children from different socioeconomic groups during school closures. Notably, the uneven distribution of relative losses within countries would have occurred even if aggregate losses of a country were uniformly distributed, just because the same absolute loss is much larger in relative terms among those with lower levels of expected educational attainment. On the whole, education disruptions due to COVID-19 are likely to have worsened pre-existing educational inequality between socio-economic groups in most countries, which would in turn increase inequality of opportunity in the society.

The effects on intergenerational mobility are significant as a result. The decline in absolute mobility that is attributable to the pandemic is particularly strong for high and upper-middle income countries, which reinforces their declining trend in absolute mobility between the cohorts of the 1970s and 1980s. While a smaller decline in absolute mobility due to the pandemic is estimated for low and lower-middle income countries, the impacts should still be a cause for concern. After all, these are groups of countries where absolute mobility has grown very slowly since the 1960s cohort and remains lower than in high and upper-middle income countries, in spite of their much lower levels of educational attainment that leave plenty of scope for members of each generation to exceed the education levels of their parents. Across developing regions, a COVID-induced decline of absolute mobility amounts to 9 percentage points in LAC, by 7 percentage points in ECA and over 5 percent in the EAP and MENA regions, relative to the baseline of no-COVID. This is a significant impact in terms of its potential impact on upward mobility of families. To a large extent, the impacts on absolute mobility are driven by the extent of aggregate learning losses in each country rather than the distribution of learning losses (by parental education) within countries. The differences in the pandemic’s impacts on absolute mobility, therefore, largely reflect differences in the aggregate impact of school closures across countries.

In contrast to the impact of the pandemic on absolute mobility, the impact on relative mobility is driven entirely by the distribution of learning losses within countries. This in turn is a consequence of unequal access to (or participation in) continued learning during school closures across children of different socio-economic backgrounds, proxied by the (maximum) education level of their parents. The impacts are significant, considering the historically slow-moving nature of this measure.<sup>19</sup> Intergenerational persistence (which is inversely related to relative mobility) is projected to increase by an average of almost 4 percent in middle-income countries, and even higher under some more optimistic learning effectiveness scenarios. For developing countries, the impact is equivalent to 40 percent of the change in mobility between the 1970s and 1980s cohorts, and up to 80 percent under alternative scenarios. Note that the fact that more optimistic assumptions about the effectiveness of alternative learning methods lead to more negative impacts of the pandemic on relative mobility reinforces the concerns related to the fact that in low-income families there was less learning of any kind during the period of school closures.

Importantly, relative mobility in high-income economies was improving before the pandemic, while, at the same time, falling in developing economies. This implies that while the pandemic may have reversed some of the gains in relative mobility made by high-income countries since the generation of the 1970s, in developing countries the pandemic may have worsened an already declining trend in relative mobility. Across developing regions, the pandemic would have led to an estimated decline in relative mobility of more than 4 percent in LAC, 3 percent in EAP, and more than 2 percent in the MENA region.

> 19 See Narayan et al (2018), since updated by Van Der Weide et al (2021) for past trends in intergenerational mobility.

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