Intergenerational Mobility in China: From the Perspective of Food Consumption Persistence
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This article estimates the intergenerational food consumption and income elasticities (IFCE and IIE, respectively) to study social mobility in China. Using China Health and Nutrition Survey, we compute the IFCE and the IIE using annual income data. We find that the IFCE in China is particularly high (0.881) and the IIE is less important (0.436). The IIE we find is close to the one estimated by Deng et al. (2012) for urban China, which is 0.4. In other words, there is a substantial effect of parental consumption on offspring consumption.This effect remains high after controlling for child and parental income using fixed effect models. We also show that the intergenerational linkage in consumption does not mainly result from the transmission of parental income, but very likely from other family effects such as the transmission of taste and habits. We also demonstrate that intergenerational food consumption elasticity constitutes a better measure of social than intergenerational income elasticity because food consumption expenditures are less subject to transitory variations than income.
RPRT
Chen, Lin
Cheung, Diana
2013
European Economic Association
2170