Special Report: The Latin American middle class (ISSN 17414474)

There is a general consensus that Latin America’s middle class has been growing, although not everyone uses the same definitions or metrics, or covers the same time-scales for measurement. The World Bank published one of the key studies on the subject in November 2012[1]. This found that the Latin American middle class, defined as those earning between US$10 and US$50 a day per capita, had increased by 50%, from 103m people in 2003 to 152m in 2009. By the later date, that meant that 30% of the total population of the region could be described as middle class. The report noted that for decades, efforts to reduce poverty and lift more people into the middle class had progressed at a very slow rate; however, there was a sharp acceleration in the decade to 2012, attributed to the boom in commodity exports and to “changes in government policies that emphasised the delivery in social programmes alongside economic stability”.