period. Similarly, for every two individuals that escaped poverty between 2010 and 2015 in Armenia, one slipped back into poverty. This high incidence of transitory poverty in both countries suggests a high degree of vulnerability in the population in these countries. Exploiting the panel data in Georgia and the risk of falling into poverty between two consecutive periods to come up with a precise definition for vulnerability, we find that as high as one in two Georgians was vulnerable to falling into poverty in 2015.

Amid all the transitions, the _second_ finding is that in both Georgia and Armenia roughly one in eight individuals was in chronic poverty in 2015. This implies that a sizeable fraction of the population has been unable to participate in the growth processes in the respective countries. The methodologies used to arrive at this finding for the two countries are quite different from one another but again, the panel data in Georgia allow us the unique opportunity to not only implement a precise definition of chronicity but also to compare and contrast the profiles of those left behind with those that managed to escape poverty.

So, _third_ we have a series of inter-related findings from Georgia: (a) chronic poverty is as prevalent in urban areas as it is in rural areas; (b) the chronic poor have seen their living standards grow at a much slower rate (10 percent cumulative) between 2009 and 2015 in comparison to the growth witnessed by the overall population (50 percent) and those that moved out of poverty (200 percent); and (c) while social assistance programs such as the TSA have provided a much-needed lifeline for the chronic poor, the ability to tap into labor market opportunities (wage jobs) and derive higher returns from available opportunities by investing in human capital has been the key ticket out of poverty for those who have actually been able to move out. The latter in particular is an especially important finding as it upends the prevailing narrative on the drivers of the observed poverty reduction in Georgia that ascribes a significant role to the social assistance programs (TSA as well as pensions).

In the second part of the paper, we expand the analysis of economic mobility witnessed within a given generation to intergenerational or social mobility. Data limitations force us to focus on intergenerational _educational_ mobility but since educational attainment is an important labor market variable anywhere, including in the South Caucasus, we argue that this captures an important part of the mechanism through which socio-economic status is transmitted across generations.

Our exploration reveals several interesting and previously unreported findings for the South Caucasus. _First_ , a significantly higher proportion of the population in this sub-region considers their family life pre-transition and the lives of their parents when they were of similar age as appropriate benchmarks to evaluate their current economic situations in comparison to the other transition countries. There are obviously variations, with Georgia’s stronger EU orientation showing up in a fifth of the Georgians considering the lives of Western Europeans as the appropriate reference and almost two in five Azerbaijanis abstaining from responding. But despite that, this general wistfulness of the life of the past does come through quite strongly.

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