The Developing World's Bulging (but Vulnerable) 'Middle Class'

By M. Ravallion. 2009

498 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The "developing world's middle class" is defined here as those who are not poor when judged by the median poverty line of developing countries, but are still poor by US standards. The "Western middle class" is defined as those who are not poor by US standards. Although barely 80 million people in the developing world entered the Western middle class over 1990-2002, economic growth and distributional shifts allowed an extra 1.2 billion people to join the developing world's middle class. Four-fifths came from Asia, and half from China. Most of the new entrants remained fairly close to poverty, with incomes now bunched up just above $2 a day. The vulnerability of this new middle class to aggregate economic contractions is evident in the fact that one in six people in the developing world live between $2 and $3 per day. Over time, the developing world has become more sharply divided between countries with a large middle class and those with a relatively small one, with Africa prominent in the latter group. Poor people in countries with smaller middle classes may well be more exposed to slowing economic growth.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f14241031e47c56526f19a8b7d22d37a02d28da1

Citations in the corpus

• A vulnerability approach to the definition of the middle class (2011, unknown): “In an influential work, Banerjee and Duflo [2] (BD from here onwards) have defined middle class as those living with a per capita expenditure on $2–10 a day, while Ravallion [23] proposed thresholds ranging between $2 a day (the median poverty line in 70 developing countries), and $13 a day (the pov”
• Poverty and distributional effects of carbon pricing in low- and middle-income countries – A global comparative analysis (2019, unknown): “While protests against increasing energy prices have not typically been found to be led by the very poor, Lockwood (2015) and Ravallion (2010) acknowledge that in many lower-income countries a rapidly growing group, often referred to as emerging middle class, has gained political importance.”
• Weakly Relative Poverty (2009, unknown): “…$3.24 per day at 1993 PPP, while the new schedule of relative poverty lines in equation (6) has a kink at $1.95 a day at 2005 PPP. 34 Ferreira and Ravallion (2009) provide an overview of the evidence on this stylized fact. measure under that benchmark, let Fi(Zi) denote the proportion of the…”
• The (Indispensable) Middle Class in Developing Countries; or, the Rich and the Rest, Not the Poor and the Rest (2010, unknown): “13 For other recent definitions, see World Bank (2007); Birdsall, Graham and Pettinato (2000); Banerjee and Duflo, 2008 and Ravallion (2009).”
• The interaction of human population, food production, and biodiversity protection (2017, unknown): “A crisp dichotomy between the global North and the global South is becoming outmoded by the growth of a global consumer class, which has increased by hundreds of millions of people in the past two decades and will grow by billions in the decades ahead (56, 57).”
• The Rise of a Middle Class in East and Southern Africa: Implications for Food System Transformation (2014, unknown): “We follow Banerjee and Duflo (2008) and Ravallion (2010) in using a fixed approach that defines the middle class as those above the international poverty line of US$2/day in 2005 per capita purchasing power parity terms, and below some upper cut-off.”
• Livestock sector development for poverty reduction: an economic and policy perspective. Livestock's many virtues. (2012, unknown): “Sources: Chen and Ravallion, 2008; Ravallion, 2009.”
• Sustainability-oriented innovation systems – managing the green transformation (2012, unknown): “A particularly noteworthy phenomenon is the rise across the globe of urban middle classes emulating the resource-intensive life styles of the West (Kharas, 2010; Ravallion, 2009), which is exerting additional pressure on scarce natural resources.”
• Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion – A Rapid Review of Income Distribution in 141 Countries (2011, unknown): “4 Based on PPP estimates in constant 2005 international dollars from Chen and Ravallion (2008).”
• Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class (2012, unknown): “per capita expenditure of US$2–US$10 a day and analyze the consumption and employment patterns of this group in 11 developing countries. Similarly, Ravallion (2010) recently proposed the concept of a “developing world’s middle class,” defined as a range between the developing countries’ median pover”