Friday, February 13, 2009

The inexorable rise of the middle classes

The middle way

Feb 13th 2009
From Economist.com

The inexorable rise of the middle classes


HAROLD MACMILLAN, a patrician British prime minister who came to power in the 1950s, famously asked who are the middle classes. Had he looked down his nose carefully enough he would have seen them all around him. By the 1960s they comprised just under a third of the world's population. Nowadays the chance that you are a memeber yourself is high—57% of the globe count as middle class, according to Surjit Bhalla, an Indian economist. This hs much to do with impressive economic growth in developing countries. China's middle class has expanded particularly rapidly. Now the bulk of the population of the Middle kingdom are middle class.

EPA