farmers or construction workers have similar (educational, occupational and income) prospects—one where a parent’s income, occupation, education, or status does not fully or substantially predetermine the son’s (or daughter’s). The origin-independence axiom, originally formulated by Shorrocks (1978) requires that the measure of mobility rise when the correlation coefficient between of the vector of outcomes for the father and the vector of outcomes for the son (or daughter) goes down. Or to be precise, if �� denotes the vector of incomes of all fathers in society and �� the vector of incomes of all sons, the mobility measure could be written as 1 � ��� where ��� signifies the correlation between father and son’s income vectors. Thus a society in which father’s position in society perfectly predicts the position his children might be able to attain is the mark of an immobile society. It is easy to see that this idea is intimately linked to the concept of equality of opportunity.

Measuring the extent of mobility along these lines however is quite challenging. This is partly because data required for this kind of analysis are hardly available in most countries, not least Nepal. Even in the most advanced economies with fairly sophisticated data, for example the United States, we are only recently beginning to see some work emerging in this area. Chetty et al (2010) have analyzed tax and administrative records of about 40 million individuals and their parents in an ambitious multi-year undertaking to come up with measures of intergenerational mobility for the United States. Similar information is not available in most developing countries.

A close second best is to study and analyze intergenerational mobility along the lines of educational attainments and occupational status of grown adults and their fathers. This is the approach that has been taken in several prominent regional studies of intergenerational mobility conducted by the World Bank (e.g., Ferreira, 2013; World Bank, 2015) and it is the approach we will follow here as well.<sup>1</sup> While not entirely adequate, we believe that this analysis is very informative, particularly for the case of Nepal where overall educational attainments started out from a very low base a generation ago and occupational status was very strongly correlated with one’s position in the Hindu caste hierarchy. So the idea of origin independence in the space of occupations would translate into the question of the extent to which children of farmers or children of particular caste/ethnic groups (e.g., Dalits) have the prospect of ending up in occupational categories that are different from their fathers and conversely whether children of higher caste individuals traditionally mandated to be in occupations that were non-manual in nature end up in other occupations.

Formulating mobility along the lines of occupation also naturally combines the concepts of economic and social mobility. Ability to obtain and work in an occupation or a job that befits one’s acquired human capital is clearly an important first step towards strengthening one’s economic position. But jobs in any social context, and particularly in the context of Nepal, also come as markers of self-identity, social status and prestige. As the debate on exclusion in Nepal highlights adequately, the marginalized groups – be it socially or economically – routinely bear the double burden of material deprivation of being in low productivity employment as well the associated indignity of their manual jobs. Social mobility for them would mean their children having a fair shot at not having to end up in similar occupations.

> 1 This approach is closer to the class and occupational group lens through which sociologists tend to study mobility. Some believe occupational status to be the primary marker of social standing, life chances as well as material comfort and a defining characteristic of advantage and privilege in society (Giddens 2009).

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