Income mobility and economic inequality from a regional perspective

A necessary condition for mobility to reduce the popular desire for redistribution is a significant positive correlation between inequality and mobility. In Prieto et al. (2008), a significant positive relationship was found at the national level. The objective of this study is to establish empirically whether such a relationship is maintained at the regional level. The indices are calculated for the set of EU regions using the European Community Household Panel survey. Total mobility is decomposed into three terms: growth, dispersion and exchange. By estimating a hierarchical linear model, it is shown that this positive relationship is robust