Stratified exits: occupational inheritance and the intergenerational dissolution of family fishing in the Philippines

As structural transformation draws the sons of the rural global South out of their parents’ livelihoods, marine capture fishing presents an especially demanding case: it exhibits some of the strongest occupational inheritance on record, and in the Philippines, where 93% of fishers work in family-based operations, the boat, the household, and the livelihood are one. Using 1.04 million co-resident father–son pairs from three Philippine censuses, with every measurement repeated for farmers’ sons, we document the dissolution of this hereditary livelihood at the population scale. By 2010, 68.4% of fishers’ co-resident sons no longer reproduced the family livelihood. Which of three unequal destinations a son reaches is strongly associated with the exits available where he comes of age. Across provinces, more outside options at labor-market entry, measured a decade in advance, are associated with sons leaving the boat at the pace that farmers’ sons leave the farm, while, under the present exposure measure, typhoon exposure is not detectably associated with inheritance. Where options are scarce, higher continuity is consistent with a last-resort pattern. The single largest destination, however, is statistical invisibility: sons present in the household yet outside the census categories of recorded employment and school attendance. This residual, which appears as a constant five-percentage-point excess over farmers’ sons, may include informal or overseas work, waiting, and other unrecorded statuses. The excess is much smaller in Indonesia, a suggestive rather than fully parallel external contrast, and is consistent with—but does not identify—exit through the Philippine maritime labor-export economy. More broadly, a high rate of sons following their fathers into fishing can reflect scarce alternatives and strong family transmission.