Meanwhile the middle class in Costa Rica – and in most other Central American countries – shrunk over the same time period as a percentage of those countries’ total population.
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NEW YORK (AP) – The dramatic lurch of hundreds of millions of people from poverty since the millennium began has not resulted in a truly global middle class, a new report says. For all we’ve heard about the emerging middle class in countries like China, Brazil, and India, the group is still quite small-about 13 percent of the world’s population in 2011, up from 7 percent in 2001.
More than half of the world’s middle-class population was living in the Asia and South Pacific region by 2011. The report shows that while commodity-rich South America and a strengthening Eastern Europe, including Russian Federation, also made strides into the middle class, Africa, India and many parts of Asia have yet to do the same. The $10-20 a day that qualifies people as middle income globally translates to $14,600 to $29,200 annually for a family of four. “Even those newly minted as middle class enjoy a standard of living that is modest by Western norms”, said the report. A recent Pew study says that as of 2011, a whopping 88% of Americans qualified as either upper-middle income or high income on a global scale. (To look at it a different way, the share of people living on $2 or less per day declined from 29 percent to 15 percent.) But the majority of those people “took only a moderate step up the income ladder, changing their status from poor to low income, ” according to the Pew report.
This global middle class is still poor when measured against the official poverty line in the US, which falls nearly directly in the middle of Pew’s range: $23,021 per year for a household of four. That’s only a sliver better than it was a decade earlier when 79% of the world was considered poor or low income.
5The number of people in poverty – living on $2 or less daily – plunged from 2001 to 2011, falling from 1.6 billion to 949 million. China’s rise in particular, with 203 million people there moving into a middle-income life over the decade starting in 2001, has resulted in what the report calls a “pivot to the east”.
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6Only 7% of the global population was high income in 2011, with $50 or more at its disposal daily. “In 2001, 91% of the world’s high-income people lived in North America and Europe; in 2011, the share was 87%”.
