23 October 2009A new report adds to evidence about why some countries are more “mobile” than others, writes Peter Browne in Inside Story

LAST MONTH, after Barack Obama invoked the American Dream at Wakefield High School in Virginia, Inside Story looked at what the statistics show about social mobility in western countries. Although a family’s socioeconomic status invariably influences children’s prospects, the data revealed the influence to be large and inequitable in some countries. In France, Italy, Britain and the United States, family background plays a very significant role in determining adult income; in Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada the effect is much smaller. Australia falls somewhere in between, closer to Denmark than to the United States. This puts the United States among a group of countries that are regarded as class-bound and stifling of individual initiative.

Our main source was a report by Anna Cristina d’Addio, a researcher in the OECD’s Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. Now, two researchers in the organisation’s Economics Department, Orsetta Causa and Asa Johansson, have released a new report that takes account of additional research and analysis. Their broad conclusion is very similar to d’Addio’s. The more equal the socioeconomic and educational backgrounds of children in a given country, the greater the degree of social mobility – which, from an economist’s perspective, is not only fairer but also more efficient.

Causa and Johansson use three main indicators – wages, secondary school achievement and post-secondary education achievement – to compare mobility across countries. Although the rankings are not identical for each indicator, these differences don’t cut across the clear messages coming out of the data...

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