Many hopes and assumptions are pinned on the middle class in developing countries, not least in Latin America. The Economist has praised its growth; economists and statisticians have struggled to define and measure it; and many have hailed it as the answer to the region’s political and developmental ills.
But for all this talk, we really don’t know much about this middle class. Who are they? Where do they work, and what is the nature and stability of that work? Do they have access to basic public goods such as health care, pensions or insurance? And now how have they been affected by global economic and financial crisis?
Many observers impute to this vague, amorphous category of the emerging economies’ middle class a whole set of assumptions based on concepts of the European or the United States middle class that drove economic development and ushered in an era of political stability. The truth is, though, that Latin America’s nascent middle class is more inchoate, informal and fragile than most people realize. We’re not talking here about Father Knows Best.