Children from poor families in Britain and the US, among others, have a greater chance of struggling on low incomes than their counterparts in some of the West’s other rich countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says.
The think tank said the chances of a young person from a less well-off family in these countries enjoying higher wages or getting a higher level of education than their parents was “relatively low.”
The findings came in the OECD’s latest Going for Growth report, which said the developed world faced a “daunting task” in restoring public finances to health after the most severe recession since the second world war. It stressed the need for stronger financial regulation and structural reform to labor markets in order to lay the foundations for sustained recovery.
“Policy reform can remove obstacles to intergenerational social mobility and thereby promote economic equality of opportunities across individuals,” the Paris-based OECD said.
“Mobility in earnings across pairs of fathers and sons is particularly low in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, while mobility is higher in the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada,” it said.
It said there was a hefty wage premium associated with growing up in a better-educated household and a corresponding penalty for being raised in a less-educated family.
“The premium and penalty are particularly large in southern European countries.”
In the UK, the OECD found that 50 percent of the economic advantage that high-earning fathers have over low-earning fathers is passed on to their sons.
By contrast, in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries, less than 20 percent of the wage advantage was passed on.
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