Mobility and Pathways to the Middle Class in Nepal
This paper introduces a variety of concepts and methods to examine living standards improvements in Nepal in a dynamic perspective. Using data from three rounds of Nepal Living Standards Surveys conducted in the past two decades, together with data...
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/09/26790349/mobility-pathways-middle-class-nepal http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25135 |
| Summary: | This paper introduces a variety of
concepts and methods to examine living standards
improvements in Nepal in a dynamic perspective. Using data
from three rounds of Nepal Living Standards Surveys
conducted in the past two decades, together with data from a
nationally representative survey that was implemented in
2014 specifically to collect information on social and
economic mobility, the paper presents novel statistics on
the extent of inter- and intra-generational mobility in
Nepal. The findings suggest that there has been appreciable
upward mobility in education; that is, Nepalis today are
increasingly more likely to be better educated than their
parents. However, inter-generational mobility of occupations
has been much more muted, with 47 percent of Nepal today
remaining in the same occupation as their parents. Upward
mobility is higher for younger cohorts and for individuals
who move from their rural areas of birth to an urban area.
There are also significant differences in mobility by social
groups, with Dalits and Terai caste groups having lower
upward mobility odds. Examining mobility within generations
using synthetic panel techniques, the paper finds that: (a)
for every two people who escape poverty, one slides back,
suggesting significant churning around the poverty line; (b)
a large fraction of those who have escaped poverty remain
vulnerable to falling back, with an overall vulnerable
population of 45 percent; and (c) the share of the middle
class—defined as those with sufficiently low likelihood of
falling back into poverty—has increased steadily over the
past two decades, reaching 22 percent in 2010–11. However,
triangulating subjective well-being data from Gallup, it
appears that a majority of even those who constitute the
middle class are fundamentally insecure about their economic
futures. The prevalence of a large vulnerable population and
a nascent, growing but struggling middle class represents a
key challenge to consolidating recent gains in moving people
out of poverty. |
|---|