Income Mobility in a Changing Macroeconomic Environment

The analysis of income mobility is often constrained to short-term periods of survey panel data. This paper provides long-term income mobility trends through a continuum of short- term synthetic panels in Mexico. The examined period of analysis (1989–2018) is characterized by the lack of panel data and by a changing macroeconomic environment. The analysis builds on cross-sectional survey data using the methodology developed in Bourguignon and Moreno (2020) and employs several income mobility indicators from three complementary conceptions used in the literature: positional mobility, directional movement, and mobility as an equalizer of longer-term incomes. This research documents low levels of economic mobility over the course of three decades, except for the periods of rebound economic growth following the two deepest economic crises in modern times: one internal, in 1995, and one external – in 2009. These movements, however, seem to be only transitory deviations as income mobility indicators soon returned to their characteristic levels.