The World Bank - October 25, 2013
Globalization has benefited an emerging “global middle class,” mainly
people in places such as China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil, along with
the world’s top 1 percent. But people at the very bottom of the income
ladder, as well as the lower-middle class of rich countries, lost out.
The findings, presented by economist Branko Milanovic to a packed
audience of more than 120 people at a Policy Research Talk at the World
Bank earlier this month, come just as the institution mobilizes around
two goals: ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting the income growth
of every country’s bottom 40 percent.
“Those goals are very ambitious, since the pace of growth is uncertain,”
says World Bank Research Director Asli Demirguc-Kunt, who hosted the
event. “Boosting shared prosperity also requires us to tackle
inequality, not just within countries, but across countries as well, as
globalization has made it easier for goods and people to move around the
world.”
The new global middle class, about 400 million people, earned more and
consumed more in the 20-year span before the global financial crisis hit
in 2008, propelled by economic growth in countries such as India and
China, said Milanovic, a lead economist in the Bank’s research
department who has been studying inequality since the 1980s. He made the
cross-country comparisons using a newly-created database of World Bank-
managed household surveys that covers some 120 countries from 1988 to
2008.
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