COVID-19 school closures, learning losses and intergenerational mobility

Abstract The paper investigates the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the ability of children from different backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific learning loss simulation models using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and type of continued learning during school closures across children from different backgrounds. Using this information, the paper simulates counterfactual educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures to estimate COVID-19 impacts. The results suggest that the extensive school closures are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative mobility in the absence of remedial measures – in upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents could decline by 8 percentage points. Unequal access to continued learning across children from different socioeconomic backgrounds also leads to a significant decline in relative mobility. Notably, adopting more optimistic assumptions about the effectiveness of alternative learning modalities makes the simulated decline in relative mobility even larger.