China and Russia’s transitions from central economic planning changed daily life. New research reveals how they also changed generational opportunity.
A paper co-authored by Steven Durlauf, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, examines these historic adoptions of 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 UChicago James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility.
“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: overall mobility, which captures both transitional and long-run changes; structural mobility, reflecting broad societal changes, such as shifts away from farming or manufacturing; and 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,” Butaeva added. “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, widespread urbanization, and rapid scientific and technological development.
By the early 1970s, over 90% of Soviet youth were enrolled in secondary education, though access to higher education remained unequal.
Educational and occupational 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, at about 42%, than China, which tracked at 19-27%.
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. Meanwhile 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, at about 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, such as 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.
—Adapted from an article originally published on the Harris School of Public Policy website.
