Más profesionales en ciencia, ingeniería y tecnología, más movilidad intergeneracional de ingresos en Latinoamérica

Abstract

Intergenerational income mobility (IIM) is the ability to change social class regardless of social class of origin. While in Latin America the IIM is especially low, a new creative class has managed to reach the highest deciles in the region, without necessarily belonging to the ruling class. Given that creatives in Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) are especially well paid and there is an excess of demand from the labor market, we hypothesized that the increase in professionals in SET would increase IIM in Latin America. The methodology applied has two steps: first, we classified 72 countries in the world into three groups according to their IIM —7 are Latin American—; second, we estimate an ordered probit to know if the publications in SET (as a proxy of the professionals of these careers) affect the probability that the Latin American countries considered pass from one group to another. The results confirm the hypothesis.

Keywords

• intergenerational income mobility
• creative class
• science careers
• skills mismatch