​Discrimination and exclusion in the process of capability formation and the labor market transcend the boundaries of the current generation and spill over to successive generations as well. Though a plethora of work has been done at the international level, the area has not been the focus of Indian economic research despite social exclusion and disparity having been quite substantial in India, especially the division along caste lines. The book addresses this research gap and explores the issue of intergenerational mobility across different social classes in the Indian context, analyzing the spheres of both education and occupation. We contend that parental education and occupation have a significantly greater impact on educational attainment and occupational choice for socially excluded groups compared to the advanced groups. In the labor market, intergenerational mobility is low and most of it is lateral and not vertical, increasing the possibility of discrimination in the labor market. This book highlights the fact that the long history of social exclusion has had a lasting effect and it is very difficult to come out of this inertia.

Social mobility is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social mobility, but there is broad agreement that people should have roughly equal chances of success regardless of their economic status at birth. Concerns about rising inequality have engendered a renewed interest in social mobility—especially in the developing world. However, efforts to construct the databases and meet the standards required for conventional analyses of social mobility are at a preliminary stage and need to be complemented by innovative, conceptual, and methodological advances. If forms of mobility have slowed in the West, then we might be entering an age of rigid stratification with defined boundaries between the always-haves and the never-haves-which does not augur well for social stability. Social mobility research is ongoing, with substantive findings in different disciplines—typically with researchers in isolation from each other. A key contribution of this book is the pulling together of the emerging streams of knowledge. Generating policy-relevant knowledge is a principal concern. Three basic questions frame the study of diverse aspects of social mobility in the book. How to assess the extent of social mobility in a given development context when the datasets by conventional measurement techniques are unavailable? How to identify drivers and inhibitors of social mobility in particular developing country contexts? How to acquire the knowledge required to design interventions to raise social mobility, either by increasing upward mobility or by lowering downward mobility?

The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.

Migration has emerged as an important issue in contemporary global politics and in the discourse around human development. This book highlights the role of migration in socioeconomic development and its interdependence with urbanization, employment, labour and industry. This volume identifies the challenges which migration and the subsequent dynamism in population and spatial parameters pose to land-use patterns, ecology, social politics and international relations. Through a study of migration patterns and trends in different parts of India, this collection analyzes the relationship of migration with social and occupational mobility, poverty and wealth indices, inequality, distribution of resources and demographic change. It also explores policy measures and frameworks which can bring migration into the fold of national development strategies. Timely and comprehensive, the book underscores the importance of migration and urbanization, sustainability and inclusivity to economic growth and development. It will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of migration studies, political studies, sociology, urban studies, development studies and political sociology.

Focussing on patterns of intergenerational stability, this book traces the unequal structures of opportunity in India. The author addresses questions and approaches towards social mobility (or the lack thereof) through interactions between social class, caste, and gender while adopting a rural–urban perspective, capturing changes over time, and the implications of social mobility on a national scale. This book plugs in crucial gaps in the research on social mobility, which has been marked by the lack of precision regarding the extent of mobility in contemporary India. Using a broad lens of both caste and class, this up-to-date statistical analysis, which uses national-level datasets and advanced quantitative methods, enriches the sociological as well as the anthropological literature, while also locating India within the larger context of social mobility research in the industrialized and industrializing world.

This book covers a wide range of the issues in development studies. Recognizing the existence of manifold challenges in achieving and sustaining economic development, it is divided into four sections—(i) The Macroeconomy: Foreign Trade, Structural Transition and the Environment, (ii) Health and Standard of Living, (iii) Education, Human Capital and Evolution of the Employment Quality in India, and (iv) Banking and Credit: Access, Efficiency and Stability. The book brings together a right mix of senior and young economists who use cutting edge econometric techniques and/ or revisit a perennial question with much sharper focus and tools to unravel insights that are important and will inform tomorrow’s theorisation and policy making. The volume looks at important questions like spatial concentration of low infant and child health outcomes, trade liberalisation and export quality, intergenerational occupational mobility, multidimensional poverty incidence in rural India, robustness of the banking sector, to name a few. To do so, the contributions use novel and esoteric methods like machine learning, spatial econometrics, system GMM, quintile regression and counterfactual decomposition (QRCD), and so on. The rich collection holds importance for researchers and policy makers alike, and also for practitioners working in different developmental sectors..

This report provides new evidence on social mobility in the context of increased inequalities of income and opportunities in OECD and selected emerging economies. It covers the aspects of both, social mobility between parents and children and of personal income mobility over the life course, ...