In a report released Wednesday, July 8, 2015, the Pew Research Center says China’s rise in living conditions, 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”.
Advertisement
For the report, Pew examined 111 countries, which accounted for 88 percent of the global population and 85 percent of the world output as of 2011. For ease of exposition, the report refers to income ranges in whole numbers, such as $10-20 in reference to who is middle income.
This is not to say that the USA, along with other advanced economies, does not struggle with issues of income inequality and poverty.
Despite the rhetoric about rising middle class and rising income levels in emerging economies, India has failed to usher low-income people into the middle-class the way China did, a new study has found.
“In 2001, 91 per cent of the world’s high-income people lived in North America and Europe; in 2011, the share was 87 per cent”.
Read the full study and analysis here.
This report divides the population in each country into five groups based on the daily per capita consumption or income of a family.
The Pew Research Center is out with a new report on the growth of the global middle class that, if you’re not the sort of person who lives to ponder foreign development or how to sell sneakers in China, is mostly interesting because of how it puts America’s incredibly high standards of living into a bit of perspective.
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. Most of the rest emanates from Eastern Europe and South America. Countries in South America and in Eastern Europe added 50 million and 39 million to the global middle class, respectively. (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.
Happily, many experts have predicted that this pattern will continue.
Advertisement
Additionally, the US National Intelligence Council posited this trend as a potential portent of political change. In this case, the Council says the rise in income could be a political game changer by helping to promote democracy worldwide. Most of the world is still very poor by rich-country standards, and the toll of suffering contained in that fact should always be kept in mind. And while we haven’t achieved a middle class status for all quite yet, we could be slowly headed in that direction.
