Toward an International Comparison of Economic and Educational Mobility:Recent Findings from the Japan Child Panel Survey
In past decades, income inequality has risen in most developed countries. There is growing
interest among economists in international comparisons of economic and educational
mobility. This is aided by the availability of internationally comparable, large-scale data.
The present paper aims to make three contributions. First, we introduce the Japan Child
Panel Survey (JCPS), the first longitudinal survey of school-age children that includes
cognitive and non-cognitive measures, and rich household information. The JCPS was
developed to measure dynamic inter-relationships between children’s academic and social
outcomes, their family background, and local policy and environment, in a way that allows
comparison of the results with international data. Second, based on JCPS data, we present
selected results of the dynamics of inequality in multiple indicators of children’s
educational and behavioral outcomes. We found that changes in cognitive achievement
across parental income groups, the degree of mobility of cognitive test scores, and the
correlation between the difficulty score and parental education in Japan are similar to other
countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. Finally we
discuss issues underlying the globalization of education research based on our experiences
with the JCPS. We discuss reasons and strategies for further globalization of education
research in Japan, and propose suggestions as to how Japanese education research can move
toward better international collaboration, particularly in research on economic and
educational mobility.