Vortrag
Seventy Years of Climbing: Post-socialist Transition and Educational Mobility in Kyrgyzstan

Tilman Brück, Damir Esenaliev

26th Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE)
Bern, Schweiz, 20.06.2012 - 23.06.2012



Abstract:
It is widely believed that twenty years of post-socialist transformation has strengthened the association of socio-economic status, such as education or incomes, between parents and children. This finding is mainly based on studies conducted in post-socialist countries in Europe. Little is known about Central Asia. This paper investigates developments in educational mobility during the transition in Kyrgyzstan, one of the five Central Asian countries. Using the data from three household surveys collected in 1993, 1998 and 2010, we examine how educational mobility has changed in a half century by calculating correlations and running regressions between educational levels of adults aged 20-69 to the schooling level of their parents. We find that Kyrgyzstan has maintained strong educational mobility comparable with the levels in Soviet times. We argue that the expansion of tertiary educational institutions in the last two decades is a reason of high mobility. However, consistentwith other studies in Eastern Europe, we find a sharp decline in educational mobility for aged 25-34, the generation whose schooling and employment experience was affected by the transition. This may indicate that nowadays a higher parental socio-economic status may play a major role in children's enrolment at the post-secondary education, thus leaving fewer opportunities for children from worse-off families. In addition, as there is practically no gender disparity in schooling in Kyrgyzstan, we find no significant gender differences in our estimates.