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

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