...CHINA’S MIDDLE CLASS GROWTH Talking about China is talk about an ancient country with a long tradition that has maintained through the centuries, China has a rich history, long lived tradition, firm beliefs and always has been a really big country with everything to succeed, the resources, the knowledge and the people, for every country the people is the most important factor to take into consideration, and China has the biggest population in the world, that is because before of 1850 China had a long time of prosperity and peace and due to that the population grew, then the people wanted more goods and the emperors didn’t want to open the commerce to foreign countries and they had big walls to international commerce because the emperors believed that foreign people were barbarians and they had it all inside of china and they didn’t need anything of foreigners, but the Chinese products like the silk, porcelain and tea leaves were high solicited in Europe and England decided to enter to the Chinese commerce, but how to do that in such adverse situations, well they decided to use a non-honorable way to get into, and that is why they introduced the opium to china to make them desire a product that they didn’t had, and the population became addict to the opium, and that released two wars in which China lose and due to that Hong Kong became a free commerce center according to an a agreement with the English and then one civil war took part in the history and was the biggest of...
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...I know I’m dating myself by writing this, but I remember the middle class. I grew up in an automaking town in the 1970s, when it was still possible for a high school graduate — or even a high school dropout — to get a job on an assembly line and earn more money than a high school teacher. “I had this student,” my history teacher once told me, “a real chucklehead. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school, a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, ‘That’s my car.’ Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he was an electrician’s assistant or something. He handed light bulbs to an electrician.” In our neighbors’ driveways, in their living rooms, in their backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds, snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I’ve always believed that the ’70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot because they were a time when people without culture or education had the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975 sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats. That all began to change in the 1980s. The recession at the beginning of that decade – America’s first Great Recession – was the beginning of the end for the bourgeois proletariat. Steelworkers showed...
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...Winning the battle for China’s new middle class A huge wave of increasingly affluent consumers will constitute China’s urban majority by 2020. To serve them, multinationals must adapt—or be left behind. June 2013 | byMax Magni and Felix Poh The rapid emergence of a prosperous, more individualistic, and more sophisticated class of consumers in China is creating unprecedented opportunities and challenges for companies serving them. The opportunity is clear: in less than a decade, more than three-fourths of China’s urban households will approach middle-class status on a purchasing-power-parity basis (for details, see “Mapping China’s middle class”). But the market is rapidly bifurcating between a still large (but less affluent) mass market and a new, even bigger group of upper-middle-class consumers—one that’s so large and significant we’ve referred to it in the past as the “new mainstream.”1The people in this more affluent segment tend to live in China’s higher-tier cities and coastal areas, enjoy household incomes between 106,000 and 229,000 renminbi ($16,000 to $34,000) a year, and have opinions strikingly different from those of their mass-market middle-class counterparts.2 As China’s new upper middle class swells to include more than half of the country’s urban households by 2020—up from just 14 percent in 2012—it will strain many of today’s business models. Companies that have long catered to consumers trying to meet basic needs at affordable prices will face a shrinking...
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...population. Brazil is one of the countries, which are among the biggest and fastest growing emerging markets. It is now the 6th largest economy in the world after United States, China, Japan, Germany and France. This fast development is also accompanied by socio-economic changes, and more particularly to an evolution of social classes. Does Brazil really become a sustainable middle-class country? In order to answer to this problematic question, we are going to explain why the Brazilian middle-class can be qualified with the adjective « new », why it differs from middle-class existing in others developed countries and why there are some risks class C setbacks. Then, we are going to demonstrate, according to the definition of « middle-class », that Brazil owns every characteristics which allow to qualify her as a sustainable middle-class country. One of the most impressive results of Brazil's economic rise has been the explosion of the middle class, and the expansion of what is called the C Class. Beyond the stock market, the oil fields, and the upcoming international events, the new middle class is what really has helped fuel growth and has attracted so much investment and international business. In Brazil, socioeconomic levels are divided by letters: A and B (upper income),...
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...The term "middle class" is first attested in James Bradshaw's 1745 pamphlet Scheme to prevent running Irish Wools to France.[1][2] Another phrase used in Early modern Europe was "the middling sort".[3][4] The term "middle class" has had several, sometimes contradictory, meanings. It was once defined by exception as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe.[by whom?] While the nobility owned the countryside, and the peasantry worked the countryside, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city. In France, the middle classes helped drive the French Revolution.[5] Another definition equated the middle class to the original meaning of capitalist: someone with so much capital that they could rival nobles. In fact, to be a capital-owning millionaire was the essential criterion of the middle class in the industrial revolution. The modern usage of the term "middle class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T.H.C. Stevenson identified the middle class as that falling between the upper class and the working class.[citation needed] Included as belonging to the middle class are professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle class is possession of significant human capital. Within capitalism, "middle class" initially referred to the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie. However, with...
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...The Middle Class in India I was born in a middle class Indian family. Since the age I got to understand this world I saw my parents working hard all day and night. I learned at a very young age the struggles that my parents faced. I was good in studies from childhood and that was the biggest thing my parents were proud of. At the end of each long day my dad would say to my mom, "I will give my son the best education, he will not struggle like this. What I was unable to do, my son will do." My father wanted to become a doctor but could not make his dream true, as my grandfather didn't provide him money to get admission. That is when I understood that after being born in middle class how difficult it is to come up in life and become successful. There are innumerable hardships faced by a middle class man in his everyday life with less salary to meet up the necessities and his dream. Indian society can broadly be divided into three classes. On the top, there are the rich. They are the people who have got everything in plenty. At the bottom there are the poor. They are ill-fed and ill clad. It is seldom that they have their own houses to live in. In between these two classes, we have the middle class. The people belonging to this class are neither very rich nor very poor. They have to maintain themselves outwardly in a fitting and decent manner. Somewhere, hanging out of local trains, bargaining in the market and in the matrimonial columns of the Times of India is the Indian Middle...
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...Wells Bratton “RIP, the Middle Class: 1946-2013” Summary The author of “RIP, the Middle Class: 1946-2013” is trying to prove a point that the middle class is going away slowly and that soon there will only be the rich and the poor, but no in-between. He starts by talking about how in the 1960s and 1970s a high school dropout could make enough money to buy just about anything he wanted, and that a high school teacher could not even make that much. Nowadays if somebody wants to make enough money to buy almost everything that they want it takes four years of college along with a high school degree and that does not guarantee that. The story begins with the author telling a story his history teacher told him about a student he had that refused to study and finally dropped out. That student came back to him a year later and pointed out the window at a brand new Camaro and said, “That’s my car”. Meanwhile, the history teacher was driving a beat up station wagon because he did not make enough money to buy a new one. This is the main prowess of the story. The middle class has been steadily declining since then and if we do not do anything about it, it will soon be gone and there will only be the upper class and the lower class just like old times. In the 1980s, this period of “the Decade That Taste Forgot” ended and people began to show up to their jobs to find that the doors were locked and that they no longer had jobs. The lucky ones that were not fired were moved to another...
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...Who are the Indian Middle Class? A Mixture Model of Class Membership Based on Durables Ownership1, 2 Sudeshna Maitra Department of Economics, York University 1038 Vari Hall 4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Email: smaitra@econ.yorku.ca Phone: 416-736-2100 Ext. 77052 Fax: 416-736-5987 July 2007 PRELIMINARY DRAFT, PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE! I sincerely thank Barry Smith, whose insights have greatly benefited this research. All remaining errors in the paper are my own. 2 The research was undertaken while I was Research Fellow at The Conference Board, New York, and I am grateful to Bart van Ark, Ataman Ozyildirim and June Shelp for comments and support. 1 Who are the Indian Middle Class? A Mixture Model of Class Membership Based on Durables Ownership Sudeshna Maitra York University July, 2007 ABSTRACT The size and consumption habits of the Indian middle class have evoked considerable interest in the media in the past two decades. Yet the definition of the middle class has been nebulous at best. I propose the use of a mixture model of class membership to identify and estimate the size of the lower, middle and upper classes in urban India, based on their distinct durables ownership patterns. Estimates using NSS data (55th Round, 1999-00) suggest that the urban middle class in India constitutes approximately 62% of urban households (which implies about 17% of all households) with mean ownership of 3 durable goods (out of 12). I also estimate the probability that each...
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...Dear Professor Matthews and Classmates, Money is the one object or possession that drives our country and many others. But how does it affect us socially? Economic status’ lines are drawn quite deep, these groups are the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the poor. The middle class and working class make up the majority of the United States. Income and wealth are the influences within these groups that fluctuates each section. When people hear the word income they take in mind one’s financial status. The word income is the money a person receives by working or transfer such as birthday gifts, inheritance from a grandparent or parent, and even government checks. Wealth on the other hand by definition is a person or family’s net worth. Wealth...
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...Social hierarchy has existed from the start of time it seems, as in the medieval ages you always have the royals and the peasants. In the United States of America there is a system in place showing the social hierchy which consist Elites at the top, only making up one percent of the population, use the government to extort the rest of the population by using the law in their favor against the middle class, immigrants, and those suffering from poverty. This form of hierarchy is supported by Social Darwinism; the idea that the wealthy are the fit, and the poor are the weak so they are not to be helped. Is society’s way of taking out the weaklings, and further validates the corruption during this time period, disappearing middle class, and the...
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...explicate on why the middle class structure has diminished, let us take a look at what other resources are saying about the problem and why this problem is worth rectifying. Back in 2007 and 2008, the household income in the United States at both the national and state levels started to adjust. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income in the United States for 2007 was $52,673 (Semega, 4). This data excluded any of the residents living in school dormitories and other geographic areas that had less than 65,000 people in the community. Then in 2008, the national median household income level dropped 1.2% nearing $52,029 per household (Semega, 4). This decline was approximately $644 per household in loss after one year with roughly $53 in decreased income per month. In...
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...Globalization and changes of middle class essay Topic: Are middle class Victims or Winners of globalization The term ‘middle class,’ it is a vague word as the concept and the meaning of it has been changed over time. For example, in medieval era Europe, the classification of social classes was based on the descent such as nobles and peasants. The nobles in England were classified as high class even though they were lack of wealth. However, the peasants were not able to become high class no matter how wealthy they were, so the classification of peasants with wealth was classified as middle class. As the time flew and when the capitalism has taken place instead of hierarchy, the classification of middle class has changed once more which is mainly classified by the person’s occupation and the wealth the person has. For example of United Kingdom in 1911, the middle class was the class that falls between the upper class and the working class which are professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. However, nowadays, as the economy and technology has developed in fast pace, the definition of the middle class have changed once again that is determined according to the income level of a person. According to The Economics in February 2009, the definition of the middle classes is the people who have a reasonable income with stable job occupation. The Economics also pointed out that the number of middle classes has exploded from 1980s to 2000s. What can be the reason of such a...
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...population. This means that about half of the working class people died, therefore, the remaining ones were in great demand. By the fourteenth century England was more urbanized; in two centuries the population in London arose from 18,000 people to 45,000 people. This means that merchants and craftsmen had more possible clients in a more reduced space. Also, common people like the yeoman were able to get small pieces of land to farm. As a result to urbanization and factors like the Black Death; merchants, craftsmen, and peasants were benefited. Little by little, the division among the estates began to become blurry. It was inevitable to notice the rising of the middle class; first, second, and third estate people were well aware as were the writers and thinkers of the time such as William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer who reflect these changes on their writings and even show how they support these changes. In early medieval times, the idea that the world was to be run under a system that separated people according to their roles on society led to the feudal system. Important people in the church supported this idea therefore there no one would question it. In the 11th century, Bishop Aldebaron of Laon in France wrote: “triple is the house of God, which is thought to be one: some pray (1st estate), others fight (2nd estate), still others work (3rd estate); which three are joined together and may not be torn asunder”. Throughout the middle age the rigid cycle of the feudal system and...
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...I would consider my family to be a middle-class. My parents have both worked very hard throughout their twenty-four-year marriage to get to where they are now. I would consider us to be middle class based on the household income plus how much debt my family owes. Although my parent’s income raises us in social class, if there was to be a loss in income due to job loss, it would be a devastating blow to our “lifestyle”. This is due to the use of credit cards and loans to keep our status at where we think it should be. We have used these credit conveniences to keep us from being inconvenienced by not having the items we have become accustomed to having. The political side of our family is a house divided. My mother and sister lean to the left...
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...RACE, GENDER AND GROWTH OF THE AFFLUENT MIDDLE CLASS IN POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA BIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF THE ECONOMIC SOCIETY OF SOUTH AFRICA, UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE, BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA, 25-27 SEPTEMBER 2013 Justin Visagie justinvisagie@gmail.com Abstract This paper examines the development of the middle class in post-apartheid South Africa, using data from the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, the 2000 Income and Expenditure Survey/Labour Force Survey and the 2008 National Income Dynamics Study. The affluent middle class are defined as individuals residing in a household with a per capita income of R1,400 – R10,000 per month in 2008 prices. The paper explores changes in the size of the middle class as well as the racial and gender profile of the middle class within the context of Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa. The affluent middle class experienced very modest growth over the period, only slightly ahead of population growth. There was however substantial churning in the racial composition of the middle class, with a large increase in the number of Africans accompanied by a fewer number of Whites. The gender profile of the middle class showed less conclusive evidence of transformation. The upper class similarly experienced significant racial transformation and more than doubled in size, and also accrued a higher share of total income (at the expense of the income shares of middle and lower classes). 1. Introduction South...
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