The Developing World's Bulging (But Vulnerable) "Middle Class"

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

Can we live within environmental limits and still reduce poverty? Degrowth or decoupling?

The word 'development' is vaguely defined and has diverse meanings in all aspects (political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal and so forth). Development can be qualitative or quantitative, but this paper concentrates on the qualitative part, although it agrees that qualitative development is the foundation for quality improvement of lives around the world. However, below are some of the generally accepted meanings: According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), it uses a more detailed definitionaccording to them development is 'to lead/live long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living and to be able to participate in the life of the community.' According to the UNDP, development is looked as "Human Development" (Henk, 2005:2). According to the Department of Foreign Affairs, (Canada, 1999:5), Canada has also incorporated human security/development approach into its foreign policy formulation process(es). The country has redefined the concept of security from the traditional one to that which guarantees "safety for people from both violent and non-violent threats…..characterized by freedom from pervasive threats to people's rights, their safety, or even their lives". The country has also backed its new commitment by expending huge amounts of money and other resources to promote human security worldwide, especially in the form of aid. According to the South Africa White Paper on Defence, 1996, development is an all-encompassing condition in which individual citizens live in freedom, peace and safety; participate fully in the process of governance; enjoy the protection fundamental rights; have access to resources and the basic necessities of life; and inhabit an environment which is not detrimental to their health and wellbeing not only in terms of the internal security of the state, but also in terms of secure systems of food health, money and trade (it is about human security supported by the states and non-state actors). Therefore development is to empower the poor, it is about local people taking control of their own lives, expressing their own demands and finding their own solutions to their problems. Development encompasses capacity building, sensitization training, workshops, seminars and conferences aimed at exploiting the ability or potential of an individual to become self-sustained and support themselves at least to have a decent life. Therefore, development is the act of improving quality of life and making sure everyone has an improved standard of live in the world with the help or efforts of the local people, international bodies, governments and a variety of civil society organizations such as NGOs, community organizations and religious groups. It is also called global development or international development, a vague term covering a wide range of activities, but in simplistic terms it can be understood as the fight against poverty to allow International Development 8 developing countries to 'catch up' with the rest of the world. It has become important to focus on sustainable strategies that focus on long term development rather than quick fixes (Thomas, 2000) . International development or global development is most used in a holistic and multi-disciplinary context of human development and aims at the development of greater quality of life for humans. It, therefore, encompasses foreign aid, governance, healthcare, education, poverty reduction, gender equality, disaster preparedness, infrastructure, economics, human rights, environment and issues associated with these (Worsley,1999). International development ensures that all human beings in the world live a quality life to lift themselves out of poverty and raise their standard of living to one that is closer to the standard of living of the developed states by ensuring that they have access to basic needs of life (food, shelter, clothing, clean and safe water, medicine among others). About 2.6 billion people (about two out of five) live on less than $2 per day. In another comparison, the World Bank, almost one-half of the world's 6.5 billion inhabitants live on the equivalent of less than two dollars a day, and about one-fourth of the world live on the equivalent of less than $1.25 a day (Chen and Ravallion, 2008). Meanwhile, people in the 20-richest countries on average earn 39 times more than people in the poorest 20 (Milanovi, 2007). At the same time, the extent of poverty has declined significantly. For example, the World Bank estimates that from 1981-2005 the percentage of people living on less than $1 per day was halved. The amount decreased from 52 percent to 26 percent in this period (Chen &Ravallion, 2008). In order to improve on the quality of life or to reduce poverty, donor countries, like Canada, provide developing countries with technical expertise, goods and money. According to Worsley (1999) , this is also called international development aid focused on:  Improving the health and education of the people in a country so that people do not die from lack of food, medical services or knowledge (basic needs).  Creating a sustainable food supply so that people can feed themselves,  Boosting economic development so that people can get decent jobs and support their families,  Promoting safety, human rights, and law and order so that people can thrive. According to the (Human Development Report 1996), published by the United Nations Development Program, "human development is the end economic growth which agrees that that economic growth, by increasing a nation's total wealth, also enhances its potential for reducing poverty and solving other social problems. But in poor states what all we see are greater inequality, higher unemployment, weakened democracy, loss of cultural identity, or overconsumption of natural resources needed by future generations (Todaro& Smith, 2009) . International development, however, can promote the concept of international aid aimed at alleviating some of the problems associated with a lack of development. These can only help solve or fix short term challenges and not necessarily long-term solutions (Browne, 1990) . The use of foreign aid should be short term, not long term as it can make poor states dependents on the west and becomes a tool for imperialism and exploitation which keeps poor state underdeveloped. International development, on the other hand, seeks to implement long-term solutions to problems by helping developing countries create the necessary capacity needed to provide such sustainable solutions to their problems. But a truly sustainable development project is one which will be able to carry on genuine international support, be it financial or otherwise. There are many international development projects to address a specific problem or a series of projects targeted at several aspects of improving the quality of lives in many societies. Genuine projects must involve problem solving that reflects the unique culture, politics, geography, and economy of a region. It must be participatory, appropriate, gender sensitive, respect human life, capacity building and empowerment of all people (Parfitt, 2002) . 1.6. Self-Assessment Questions  Q1. What is development and international development?  Q2. Attempt a brief history of international development.  Q3. Clearly identify the goals and means of development. These contrasts highlight both the problem and the progress of what is known in the international community as "development". Large numbers of the world's inhabitants are mired in poverty, especially in Africa, while inhabitants of the world's richest countries live in both relative and absolute luxury. However, international development aims to improve general government policies of these developing countries through the provision of basic needs. The term "development" in international parlance, therefore, encompasses the need and the means by which to provide better lives for people in poor countries. It includes not only economic growth, although that is crucial, but also human development that aims at providing health, nutrition, education, and a clean environment.

How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge – rather than from their sweat and their muscle? This chapter is about promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries – and particularly about improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills. My principal message is that a lot is being done in this regard. On the whole, this useful work is a matter of straightforward application of familiar legal and commercial instruments and skills such as copyrights, trademarks, and patents. This does not mean that it is easy, however.

Reviewed by: From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era: Middle Class Life in Midwest America by Timothy R. Mahoney Christopher Phillips Timothy R. Mahoney. From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era: Middle Class Life in Midwest America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 504 pp. $65.99 (cloth). For readers seeking a full portrayal of how the Civil War experience affected the towns, villages, and peoples of the Midwest, this book will likely not satisfy. As the third volume in the author's trilogy on the emergence and solidification of nineteenth-century middle-class society, Mahoney's book reads as such. The war, in fact, was simply another facet of hometownism. The main interpretive threads—first, that rapid town-building and intense boosterism were major formative influences in emerging urban middle-class culture and identity, and, second, that the Civil War was a watershed—read mostly here as a feedback loop to the previous books. Mahoney's principal motif for this redefinition of process and place—Main Street—is largely subsumed within myriad, too oft en disconnected details about civilian and military personae in discrete wartime communities: the river towns of Dubuque, Davenport, and Keokuk, Iowa, and of Galena, Illinois. Details about these places abound on multiple fronts: the financial downturn of 1857 and its traumatic disruptions, including its negative impact on boosterism; the prewar and wartime experiences of leading citizens such as Galena's Elihu Washburne and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as Ottawa's William H. Wallace (that Mahoney does not focus on Ottawa, Illinois, hints at the book's jumbled nature); the initial rush to the colors and subsequent wartime soldiering experiences of these communities' young and middle-aged men; the minutiae of military organization in the regiments they filled, as well as their adaptation to military life as "citizen soldiers" and their experiences of battle and camp; and the formation and activities of Union Leagues and sanitary commissions. Surely the high point of the book is Mahoney's fine-grained view of the Civil War's outbreak in 1861, by which point boosters used the coming fury to regain and reinvigorate a shaken Main Street. They did so by showing public leadership in civic engagement, expressed in parades, union meetings, debates, and civic committees. Through these, they headed up and harnessed the rage militaire that fueled the mass enlistment and mobilization of local citizens. However intimate his intent to personalize the communities he covers, Mahoney's effort is surprisingly impersonal and oft en tedious. His cast of characters is mostly drawn from towns' upper strata, including business, [End Page 208] political, and military leaders and public figures. By cleaving tightly to his thesis about class formation, he ignores several foundational and evolving home-front realities that would have drawn in readers to the wartime human drama unfolding within the book's towns. Mahoney emphasizes the importance of place, yet his use of the terms "western" and "Great West" offers no explanation of their meanings or understandings. The West, and thus westernness, appear simply to be geographical phenomena, extensions of the East even for class formation; readers are left to wonder what precisely was a "western middle class?" Women's voices on Main Street in wartime and beyond, apart from their work in hospitals and soldiers' aid societies, are mostly silent in Mahoney's narrative. He also neglects the fate of people who were not "middle class," or who lived near the towns Mahoney covers and thus were part of their metropoles. These omissions are glaring when considering the home-front's greatest political disruption: dissent against Abraham Lincoln's administration and war effort by Peace Democrats, known as "Copperheads." Mahoney devotes precious few pages to this "spatial narrative" by way of discussing the arrest of a handful of dissenters, including Dubuque Herald editor Dennis Mahoney (342–44). Curiously, the term "conscription" does not appear at all in the index. The Emancipation Proclamation is mentioned on only one page of the book, despite the fact that the dissent movement was driven centrally by conflicts over class and race, drawing primary energy from the twin issues of conscription and emancipation. Many middle states, not...

The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being

The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being

Economists in recent decades have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to well-being. In this paper, we review the evidence to assess the importance of absolute and relative income in determining well-being. Our research suggests that absolute income plays a major role in determining well-being and that national comparisons offer little evidence to support theories of relative income. We find that well-being rises with income, whether we compare people in a single country and year, whether we look across countries, or whether we look at economic growth for a given country. Through these comparisons we show that richer people report higher well-being than poorer people; that people in richer countries, on average, experience greater well-being than people in poorer countries; and that economic growth and growth in well-being are clearly related. Moreover, the data show no evidence for a satiation point above which income and well-being are no longer related.

Who makes a democracy? This has long been a classical issue in political theory since Ancient Greek times. Aristotle should be the first to be credited for formulating the empirical link between the middle class and ‘the best form of political society’, that is, democracy. In his words, democracy is where power is vested in the middle class and democracy is attainable in those states where there is a large middle class — large enough, if possible, to be stronger than both of the other classes, but at any rate large enough to be stronger than either of them singly1 The other two classes are the poor and the rich. Obviously, Aristotle preferred democracy of the middle class to democracy of the poor, which could lead to a tyranny. He also preferred middle-class politics to an oligarchy dominated by the rich. The middle-class democratic form is believed to be safer, more permanent than the other two political forms, as the middle class, having a moderate and sufficient property, tends to be ‘reasonable’ to ‘follow the rule of law’.2 KeywordsCivil SocietyMiddle ClassSocial MovementCivil Society OrganizationDemocratic Progressive PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This study presents the main facts related to the development of income inequalities in OECD countries in recent years. In particular, the focus was on analysing the economic position of the middle class (middle income class), which is often neglected in analyses, in favour of the two extreme income groups, i.e. the poverty sphere and the group of the richest. It is worth filling this gap because the middle class is the backbone of modern society and decisively determines the possibilities of economic development. The analysis of the coefficients allowing the estimation of the size and affluence of the middle class indicates that this class is highly diversified among OECD countries. In countries such as: Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Finland, Belgium, Sweden and Austria, there is a relatively large and affluent middle class. In contrast, in Anglo-Saxon countries, the middle class is relatively small and moderately affluent. The article empirically confirms the hypothesis that higher income inequalities are accompanied by middle-class erosion. Using the basic income ratio, in the form of the Gini coefficient for disposable income, a very strong negative correlation was identified both between this coefficient and the coefficient determining the size of the middle class (-0.91) and between the Gini coefficient and the coefficient determining the affluence of the middle class (-0, 84). Attention is paid to possible causes of the occurrence of the phenomenon of economic polarization. Proposals for solutions in the field of socio-economic policy aimed at limiting the scale of observed phenomena were also presented.

Many people in developing countries lack access to health technologies even basic ones. Why do these problems in access persist? What can be done to improve access to good health technologies especially for poor people in poor countries? This book answers those questions by developing a comprehensive analytical framework for access and examining six case studies to explain why some health technologies achieved more access than others. The technologies include praziquantel (for the treatment of schistosomiasis) hepatitis B vaccine malaria rapid diagnostic tests vaccine vial monitors for temperature exposure the Norplant implant contraceptive and female condoms. Based on research studies commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to better understand the development adoption and uptake of health technologies in poor countries the book concludes with specific lessons on strategies to improve access. These lessons will be of keen interest to students of health and development public health professionals and health technology developers -- all who seek to improve access to health technologies in poor countries.

Global Disparities: Of People and Pets

There is widespread concern about the impact of recent food price rises on the welfare and food security of poor people and about future impacts of high prices. Responses to these concerns are, however, sometimes clouded by lack of clarity about the nature of short and medium term impacts of food price changes for different people. This paper reviews both theory and empirical evidence on these impacts. It finds that theory and empirical evidence are broadly complementary and consistent, with a high degree of variability in impacts. In broad terms staple food price increases have had very serious effects on the poor in national or local economies which have experienced high food price shocks without broad based growth processes. Poor net buyers of food, in both rural and urban communities, have been most negatively affected, with limited second order benefits from high staple food prices tightening labour markets in poor rural economies. Short term impacts can be ameliorated by economic growth and, for international food price increases, by limited price transmission. Economic growth and lower domestic price transmission of high international prices in different countries, notably India and China, have led to lower increases in global poverty, hunger and malnourishment than hunger and poverty simulations have suggested. However these findings should not detract from the very serious impacts high food prices have had for very large numbers of very poor people in poor countries, and the need for policies and action to address this.

How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge rather than from their sweat and muscle? This paper summarizes a collection of essays that investigate the promotion of “poor people’s knowledge”—promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills. The collection is a modest attempt to look at the issue from the perspective of the economic value of poor people’s knowledge. It is about the knowledge poor people own, create, and sell rather than about what they buy. It is a collection of stories of attempts to increase poor people’s earnings from their knowledge. The essays call attention to a broader range of knowledge that has commercial potential in developing countries, and bring an economic dimension into the discussion of traditional knowledge. They highlight the incentives for and concerns of poor people— which may be different from those of corporate research, Northern nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or already successful entertainment stars. The essays demonstrate that the best answer is sometimes commercial rather than legal (for example, obtaining a formal patent or copyright protection), although in some instances standard legal approaches have been effective and it is useful to identify the problems in which legal innovation is really needed. In addition, there are many income-earning (rather than income-using) dimensions of culture.

Theories of democracy cast the middle class in a starring role. As Barrington Moore pithily put it, ‘No bourgeoisie, no democracy’.2 Crudely put, the upper class has too much to lose to engage in reform and, if a stable democracy is to emerge, the middle class must become its standard bearer. Seymour Martin Lipset believed that a large middle class was a prerequisite for an enduring democracy.3 This intellectual tradition, in turn, finds its foundations in economic determinism. The modernization school from Daniel Lerner to Alex Inkeles envisioned rising incomes going with increasingly open forms of political discourse. Since at least Karl Marx, most social scientists have believed that economic and social conditions determine political attitudes and modes of political organization. Economists assume that individual economic interests (mostly short term) drive human behavior, and that around the world ‘human’ is assumed to be ‘economicman’.4 A democracy’s legitimacy is based on popular sovereignty and public opinion. At the end of the day, the endurance of democracy depends on both the ideas of common citizens and the attitudes and actions of the elites who design and operate political institutions. A sustainable democracy requires both trust-filled elites, with sufficient confidence to leave office if they lose an election, and at least a minimally knowledgeable mass public. Theories about the middle class assume it will stand for something distinctive in politics, that is, the middle class should hold a coherent set of information, attitudes, and behaviors that distinguishes it from the upper and lower classes.