A Tale of Two Transitions: New Harris Research Unpacks Intergenerational Mobility in China and Russia

A new paper co-authored by Steven Durlauf, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, examines how social and economic opportunity has shifted across generations in China and Russia during their historic transitions from centrally planned economies to market systems. By comparing these countries to the United States, the study sheds light on the forces that shape long-term inequality and mobility.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and China's gradual opening beginning in the late 1970s marked two of the most significant social and economic transformations of the twentieth century," explained Durlauf, who also serves as the director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago. "While both countries moved away from central planning, their paths looked very different, giving us a unique opportunity to study how opportunity passes from parents to children during times of upheaval."

In the paper, entitled "A Tale of Two Transitions: Mobility Dynamics in China and Russia after Central Planning," the authors focus on intergenerational mobility, or the extent to which children's educational and occupational outcomes differ from those of their parents. To capture this, they introduce three distinct measures: (1) overall mobility, which captures both transitional and long-run changes; (2) structural mobility, reflecting broad societal changes, such as shifts away from farming or manufacturing; and (3) steady state mobility, a novel measure developed in the paper that isolates the long-run probability of movement across generations once transitional dynamics settle.

“This approach allows us to study the basic levels of mobility in evolving dynamic systems,” said Kristina Butaeva, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stone Center and coauthor on the paper. “The new framework we developed allowed us to distinguish short-term structural shifts from deeper, more enduring changes in opportunity. Without it, temporary changes in the distribution of education or occupation between parents and children, driven by major economic transitions, could create the false impression of extremely high mobility, potentially misleading researchers’ conclusions about intergenerational mobility across societies and over time.”

The families studied in the paper lived through a period of significant change. Most parents in the dataset were born between 1950 and 1970, coming of age under communist central planning. In China, that meant life in a largely rural, agrarian society still shaped by Mao Zedong. Compulsory education was limited, and by the early 1970s, only about 30% of children were enrolled in secondary school.

The Soviet Union of the same era, meanwhile, was a heavily urbanized and industrialized society, with higher levels of education and a GDP per capita about 20 times larger than China's. The post-Stalin years of the 1950s and 1960s saw more schooling, rapid scientific and technological development, and widespread urbanization. By the early 1970s, over 90% of Soviet youth were enrolled in secondary education, though access to higher education remained unequal.

Some key findings include:

• Educational Mobility: The probability of changing educational class was 52-53% in China compared to 45-46% in Russia, but roughly 68-81% of China's mobility and 57-68% of Russia's came from structural change rather than exchange mobility. At the steady state, Russia shows greater educational mobility (42%) than China (19-27%).
• Occupational Mobility: Overall occupational mobility rates were similar, with 57-58% in China and 54-57% in Russia. In China, about 60% of this change came from the shift out of agriculture, while in Russia, structural change accounted for 50% in the father-to-child sample and just 13% in the mother-to-child sample, reflecting Soviet-era gender imbalances in the workplace. Steady state occupational mobility is nearly identical across both countries (50-55%).
• Comparison to the United States: Both the United States and Russia exhibit higher steady state educational mobility than China, while occupational mobility at the steady state is similar across all three societies.

These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between mobility driven by social change (like rapid industrialization or educational expansion) and mobility built into the fabric of a society's opportunity structure, which proves much more enduring.

Written alongside coauthors Lian Chen and Albert Park, the paper builds on the work of the Stone Center in the areas of Mobility and Methodology. The Stone Center is dedicated to advancing cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research on the roots and dynamics of contemporary inequalities and serves as a hub for collaboration, bringing together scholars from across disciplines to study how education, class, occupation, income, and wealth shape mobility and opportunity.