Socio-Economic Groups, Individual and Social Mobilities: An Axiomatic Framework and the Chinese Society

26 Pages Posted: 22 Feb 2015

See all articles by Lezheng Liu

Lezheng Liu

Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE)

Baoyun Qiao

Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE)

Xiaoyu Wu

Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE)

Yongsheng Xu

Georgia State University - Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

Date Written: February 1, 2015

Abstract

A society is composed of different socio-economic groups. At a given time, individuals in the society can be classified into different such groups. With the change of time, individuals can move across different groups. Social mobility is viewed as an aggregation of such individual movements across different socio-economic groups. We develop a simple analytic framework to discuss the issue of social mobility, and derive a class of measures for social mobility. A prominent member of this class is the Bartholomew measure that has often been used in applied work. Finally, we apply our framework and the results to the Chinese society by investigating its social mobility for the period between 1989 and 2011.

Keywords: social status, individual mobility, social mobility, measurement of social mobility, Bartholomew measure, social mobility in China

JEL Classification: D31, D63, O53, O57

Suggested Citation

Liu, Lezheng and Qiao, Baoyun and Wu, Xiaoyu and Xu, Yongsheng, Socio-Economic Groups, Individual and Social Mobilities: An Axiomatic Framework and the Chinese Society (February 1, 2015). Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Research Paper Series No. 15-06, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2567905 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2567905

Lezheng Liu

Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) ( email )

39 South College Road
Haidian District
Beijing, Beijing 100081
China

Baoyun Qiao

Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) ( email )

39 South College Road
Haidian District
Beijing, Beijing 100081
China

Xiaoyu Wu

Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) ( email )

Beijing, Beijing
China

Yongsheng Xu (Contact Author)

Georgia State University - Andrew Young School of Policy Studies ( email )

Department of Economics
35 Broad Street, 6th Floor Department of Economics
Atlanta, GA 30303-3083
United States

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