Illustrating Income Mobility and Poverty Persistence

Abstract

This paper is aimed at graduate and undergraduate economics students interested in income inequality and mobility. It summarises several diagrams introduced in recent literature to illustrate income mobility. The illustrations relate to various mobility concepts: those based on relative income growth, positional change within an income distribution, and poverty persistence. The diagrams are easy to produce and, at a glance, provide valuable information about income mobility and poverty dynamics, given information about the incomes of a cohort of individuals in two or more time periods.