Abstract：The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to “encourage people to achieve prosperity through hard work, promote equal opportunities, increase the incomes of low-income earners, and expand the size of the middle-income group”. For the promotion of equal opportunities and the realization of common prosperity for all people, enhancing social mobility is crucial. This paper takes intergenerational occupational mobility as a proxy for social mobility to study the changing trends of intergenerational occupational mobility and its influencing factors in China. Specifically, this paper is based on the data from the six waves of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) from 2006 to 2017. Firstly, this study adopts the ISCO-88 job codes and the job classification method of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, dividing occupations into six categories, and ranking different occupations according to the median income within each occupation. Secondly, absolute mobility and Altham index are adopted to measure the changing trends of intergenerational mobility in China. Lastly, the binary Logit model and the Shapley value decomposition method are used to study the main factors affecting upward intergenerational occupational mobility and the changes in their contribution rates.
The research finds that from 2006 to 2017, although China’s intergenerational occupational mobility showed an initial increase followed by a decrease, the overall intergenerational occupational mobility has risen, and intergenerational occupational immobility has somewhat eased. In terms of the influencing factors of upward intergenerational mobility and changes in their contribution rates, a younger age and a higher education level of the offspring are associated with a greater probability to achieve upward intergenerational occupation mobility, and this influence of age and education level has strengthened over the years. Moreover, this paper also finds that the conversion of household registration status from “agriculture to non-agriculture” can significantly increase the probability of upward intergenerational occupational mobility, which to some extent indicates that rural families have a higher upward intergenerational occupational mobility than urban families.
Policy implications include increasing the investment in public education resources in rural areas, strengthening the policy of preferential college admission for students in central and western regions and rural areas, and farmers in a formal system of professional title promotion, all of which help to improve social mobility.
The main contributions of this paper include the following three points. First, this paper uses measures of absolute and relative mobility to depict the level and changing trends of intergenerational occupational mobility. Among them, the measure of relative mobility based on Altham index fully considers socio-economic structural changes and thus to a certain extent overcomes the defects of existing researches in indicator selection and research methods. Second, this study deeply explores the influencing factors of upward intergenerational occupational mobility and analyzes the changes in the contribution rate of each factor over time. This allows policy-makers to fully understand the changing characteristics of each factor’s contribution, thereby formulating or adjusting relevant policy measures timely and effectively according to the current situation. Third, this paper reveals the fact that the upward intergenerational occupational mobility of rural families is higher than that of urban families, and that the conversion of household registration status from “agriculture to non-agriculture” plays a substantial role. In the context of gradually diminishing dividends of urbanization in the future, this paper offers relevant policy suggestions on how to further enhance the intergenerational mobility of rural residents.
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Zuo Hong Yang Mo. A Study of the Change of Social Mobility and the Influencing Factors in China. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 0, (): 1-.
