Educational mobility across generations of formally and informally employed: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Poverty persists across generations through the transmission of informal employment from one generation to the next. Education and earnings are considered important factors that transmit informal employment across generations. Considering education as one of the transmission mechanisms of sectoral employment and poverty, no studies have yet conducted any comparative analysis of educational persistence across generations of formally and informally employed parents. Therefore, the present study estimates the intergenerational persistence of education by considering the nature of parents’ employment through intergenerational elasticity and intergenerational correlation approaches of mobility measurement. Results show that intergenerational persistence is higher at the lower levels of education when the father is informally employed. On the contrary, when the father is formally employed, this persistence is higher at the higher levels of education. This result implies that labour market reforms are essential along with educational reforms to break this intergenerational persistence.