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Measurement of the middle class has recently come to the center of policy debate in middle-income countries as they search for the potential engines of growth and good governance. This debate assumes, first, that there is a meaningful definition of class, and second, that the thresholds which define relatively homogeneous groups in terms of pre-determined sociological characteristics can be found empirically. This paper aims at proposing a view of the middle class based on vulnerability to poverty. Following this approach the paper exploits panel data to determine the amount of comparable income -associated with a low probability of falling into poverty— which could define the lower bound of the middle class. It looks at absolute thresholds, challenging the view that people just above the poverty line are actually part of the middle class. In an analogy with poverty measurement, there is a degree of arbitrariness in the definition of specific thresholds, but the concept behind them is clear and economically meaningful. The estimated lower-threshold is used in cross-section surveys to quantify the size and the evolution of middle classes in Chile, Mexico, and Peru over the past two decades. The evidence also shows that the middle class has increased significantly in all three countries. There is an important group of people, however, who cannot be defined as middle class from this perspective, but remain vulnerable to fall back into poverty.

Trends in aggregate growth and poverty reduction hide a multiplicity of development processes at the local level. The analysis reported in this paper exploits a unique panel dataset of poverty maps covering almost 2400 municipalities in Mexico and spanning 22 years, first, to test hypothesis that there is within-country income convergence. Second, through a decomposition of the poverty convergence elasticity, the analysis investigates whether this convergence, if it exists, has translated into poverty convergence. In a context of overall stagnant economic growth and poverty reduction since 1990, the analysis finds evidence of both income and poverty convergence among municipalities. As a cause of these, the results point to a combination of positive performance among the poorest municipalities and stagnant or deteriorating performance among more well-off municipalities. Redistributive programs such as cash transfers to poor households have played an important role in driving these results by bolstering income growth among the poorest municipalities, while also inducing progressive changes in the distribution of income.

The evaluation of policy performance against set targets is rarely adjusted to the heterogeneity in the initial distribution of characteristics. Building on previous literature, we propose a framework to account for differences in initial characteristics in evaluating policy performance. We apply the proposed framework to the appraisal of poverty reduction and show that initial characteristics can considerably affect performance. The framework advances by explicitly quantifying the importance of the non-linearity of the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Whilst wealthier countries did perform better in reducing poverty during 1995–2008, after equalizing the mean of the initial distribution of income the situation reverses, with the poorest countries going from being the worse to being the best performers in poverty reduction.

We consider the concept of poverty from the asset-accumulation approach and propose an integrated framework, building upon existing theories, to describe how the interconnected factors of trust (or lack thereof) and social distance can reinforce poverty traps. Social distance is influenced by choice, while trust is the symptom that defines the strength of social ties on a group. We look at how an absence of trust influences how households make decisions about the use and accumulation of assets in ways that could perpetuate poverty. Weak trust also affects how groups interact with each other in a society, creating “trust clusters” within homogeneous groups and antagonism across groups, which in turn affects aspirations and leads to an erosion of the basis of a social contract. For more effective and sustainable poverty reduction, we need to understand these linkages and address them systematically.

In measuring human development, one of the main concerns relates to the inclusion of a measure that penalizes inequalities in the distribution of achievements across the population. Using indicators from nationally representative household surveys and census data, this paper proposes a straightforward methodology to estimate a household-based distribution-sensitive human development index aggregated through generalized means. The evidence shows that the losses in human development due to inequality reach up 22, 29 and 57% in Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua, respectively. Among dimensions, the loss in the income index reaches up 61% in Nicaragua, while the education index appears as the most sensitive in the case of Mexico and Peru, with a percentage of loss between 38 and 48%. The importance of household-level calculations is highlighted when we compare the indices computed from the entire distribution with those existing indices computed for quintiles of the distribution, which minimizes the losses due to inequality. Overall, the estimations evidence a higher sensitivity of the index to inequality, and therefore an important space for public action to reduce inequality that could involve positive development returns.

Wage inequality declined in Mexico since 2000. This paper investigates the possible channels on why the wages of high-skilled workers have declined. Using data from Mexican labor surveys for the period between 2000 and 2014, we investigate if the decline was driven by wages declining more sharply for younger or older workers. We find that wages of older workers declined and the decline was more pronounced the older the cohort.  This would seem to support the hypothesis that older workers’ skills became obsolete.

The World Bank has recently defined two strategic goals: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Shared prosperity is measured as income growth among the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution in the population. The two goals should be achieved in a way that is sustainable from economic, social, and environmental perspectives. Shared Prosperity: Paving the Way in Europe and Central Asia focuses on the second goal and proposes a framework that integrates both macroeconomic and microeconomic elements. The macro variables, particularly changes in relative prices, affect income growth differentially along the income distribution; at the same time, the microeconomic distribution of assets at the bottom of the distribution determines the capacity of the bottom 40 to take advantage of the macroeconomic environment and contribute to overall growth. Growth and the incidence of growth are thus understood as jointly determined processes. Besides this integration, the main input of the framework is the finding that the trade-off between growth and equity may be an issue only in the short run. Over the long run, redistribution policies that increase the productive capacity of the bottom 40 percent enhance the overall growth potential of the economy. This report considers shared prosperity in Europe and Central Asia and concludes that the performance in sharing prosperity during the period 2000–10 was good, on average, but heterogeneous across countries and that sustainability is unclear. It also describes examples of the application of the framework to selected countries in the region. Finally, the report provides a tool to structure the policy discussion around the goal of shared prosperity and explains that specific policy links associated with the goal can be established only after a thorough analysis of the country-specific context.

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. In this paper we investigate the relationship between class (measured by the position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries. We find that both a continuous measure of income and categorical measures of income-based class are robustly associated with values. Both income and class tend to display a similar association to values and political orientations as education, although differences persist in some important dimensions. Overall, we do not find strong evidence of any “middle class particularism”: values appear to gradually shift with income, and middle class values lay between the ones of poorer and richer classes. If any, the only peculiarity of middle class values is moderation. We also find changes in values across countries to be of much larger magnitude than the ones dictated by income, education, and individual characteristics, suggesting that individual values vary primarily within bounds dictated by each society.

Latin America often is singled out because of its high and persistent income inequality. With a Gini coefficient of 0.53 in the mid-2000s,¹ Latin America was 18 percent more unequal than Sub-Saharan Africa, 36 percent more unequal than East Asia and the Pacific, and 65 percent more unequal than the high-income countries (figure 1-1). However, after rising in the 1990s, inequality in Latin America declined between 2000 and 2007. Of the seventeen countries for which comparable data are available, twelve experienced a decline in their Gini coefficient (figure 1-2). The average decline for the twelve countries was 1.1 percent a

Se busca medir el impacto de la crisis global de 2009 en la pobreza, mortalidad infantil y materna, desnutrición y educación en varios pases de América Latina. Los resultados sugieren que la desaceleración económica tiene impactos adversos en la salud, mortalidad infantil y pobreza. Los resultados en educación son ambiguos. Los resultados confirman la relevancia de establecer programas integrados de protección social que eviten que choques transitorios tengan efectos de largo plazo en el bienestar de los hogares. This paper aims to measure the impact of the global crisis on social indicators child health, mortality, education and poverty in five Latin American countries. The results suggest that economic downturns have a negative impact on child mortality, child health, and both overall and child poverty. Child poverty increases at higher rates than overall poverty. Results on education indicators are ambiguous. The paper concludes that an integrated social protection policy that protects the income of poor households and that maintains or expands basic health services during economic downturns are of critical importance to prevent transitory shock from having permanent effects on the well-being of households.