China and Russia’s shift from centrally planned economies to market systems brought major changes to daily life, but new research shows these transitions also had significant effects on generational mobility.
A recent study co-authored by Steven Durlauf, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, explores how these economic transformations in China and Russia compare with the United States in shaping long-term inequality and mobility.
“The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and China's gradual opening beginning in the late 1970s marked two of the most significant social and economic transformations of the twentieth century,” said Durlauf, who is also director of the UChicago James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility.
“While both countries moved away from central planning, their paths looked very different, giving us a unique opportunity to study how opportunity passes from parents to children during times of upheaval.”
The paper, titled “A Tale of Two Transitions: Mobility Dynamics in China and Russia after Central Planning,” focuses on intergenerational mobility—how children's educational and occupational outcomes differ from those of their parents.
To analyze this, the authors used three measures: overall mobility (which includes both transitional and long-run changes), structural mobility (broad societal shifts such as moving away from farming or manufacturing), and steady state mobility (a new measure developed by the researchers that captures long-term movement across generations after transitional effects subside).
“This approach allows us to study the basic levels of mobility in evolving dynamic systems,” said Kristina Butaeva, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stone Center and coauthor.
“The new framework we developed allowed us to distinguish short-term structural shifts from deeper, more enduring changes in opportunity,” Butaeva continued. “Without it, temporary changes in the distribution of education or occupation between parents and children, driven by major economic transitions, could create the false impression of extremely high mobility, potentially misleading researchers’ conclusions about intergenerational mobility across societies and over time.”
The families analyzed experienced substantial change. Most parents were born between 1950 and 1970 under communist rule. In China during this period, society was mostly rural with limited compulsory education; only about 30% of children attended secondary school by the early 1970s. In contrast, the Soviet Union was highly urbanized with more widespread education—over 90% enrollment in secondary schools by that time—though access to higher education remained unequal.
In terms of educational mobility, about half (52-53%) of Chinese children changed educational class compared to 45-46% in Russia. However, much of this movement resulted from structural change: roughly 68-81% for China and 57-68% for Russia. When looking at steady state figures—which strip out temporary effects—Russia showed higher educational mobility (about 42%) than China (19-27%).
Occupational mobility rates were similar: 57-58% for China versus 54-57% for Russia. In China, most change came from moving out of agriculture; in Russia, structural change accounted for a greater share among men than women due to historical gender differences in employment. Steady state occupational mobility was nearly identical at around 50-55%.
When compared with the United States, both Russia and the U.S. had higher steady state educational mobility than China; however, occupational mobility rates at steady state were similar across all three countries.
These results underscore how important it is to separate temporary changes caused by rapid social shifts—like industrialization or expanded schooling—from longer-lasting patterns built into a society’s structure.
The research was conducted with Lian Chen and Albert Park as coauthors. It builds on work at the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy—a center dedicated to interdisciplinary studies on contemporary inequalities related to education, class, occupation, income, and wealth.