Who Is the Latin American Middle Class? Relative-Income and Multidimensional Approaches

How We Got Here: The Transition of Colombia’s Middle Class in Social Mobility Perspective

“…The main limitation for its development was not having sources of information that allowed access to information and real photographs of people. Based on information available in the databases of the National Department of Statistics (DANE), the demographic composition of the people participating in the 2008 Quality of Life Survey and the social categorizations built in the framework of this project, we designed several profiles in the form of cards, containing information about sex, age, occupation, educational level, place of residence, marital status and number of children of real people, information that was complemented with a designed image by an illustrator corresponding to the profile described [35][36][37]. After several processes of discussion and adjustment, we came to the definition of 42 profiles in the form of playing cards that were used as a methodological resource in the five focus groups.…”

“…In Latin America, organizations such as ECLAC and the authors around this entity returned to the use of the notion of social class since the mid-2000s [5,17]. However, it was due to its acceptance by agencies such as the IDB [18,19] the World Bank the OCDE [20], the UNDP [21], CAF and similar entities [22][23][24] that the term "middle class" was fully enthroned in the economic heterodoxy. This has happened as the focus for studying inequality does not lie only on poverty but on all the changes in the forms of income distribution in the last ten years, which has received the bombastic denomination of the "gained decade".…”

“What’s in the middle”: Scratching beneath the surface of the middle class(es) in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Turkey and Vietnam

“…2 Based on the historical record of the impact of middle-class consolidation in advanced countries during the 20 th century (Lipset, 1960;Moore, 1966;Adelman et Morris, 1967;Landes, 1998), high expectations are associated with the middle-class momentum in developing countries. First, it is supposed to bring about the development of domestic markets for diversified goods and services (ADB, 2010; AFDB, 2011; Castellani et al, 2014). Larger middle classes are also expected to increase national saving and investment and to prompt institutional reforms, supporting private property right protection and investments in durable assets (Loayza et al 2012;Birdsall, 2015;Wietzke and Sumner, 2018).…”