Around the globe, millions escape poverty — but not for the middle class

The dramatic lurch of hundreds of millions of people from poverty since the millennium began has not resulted in a truly global middle class, a new report says. Instead, the improvement in living conditions for almost 700 million people has been a step forward from the desperate existence of $2 or less a day into a low-income world of living on $2 to $10 daily, the Pew Research Center says. Its report, released Wednesday, looks at changes in income for more than 110 countries between 2001 and 2011, the latest that data for such a large range of countries was available. For years, reaching the middle class has been held out as a goal for people in a growing number of countries.

(The report calls it) the uneven geography of the emerging middle class.

Pew Research Center

Largely because of Asia, the report says the world’s middle-income population nearly doubled over the decade, from 399 million to 784 million. But the gains are hardly seen everywhere. The report shows that while commodity-rich South America and a strengthening Eastern Europe, including Russia, also made strides into the middle class, Africa, India and many parts of Asia have yet to do the same. The report comes just two days after the United Nations announced success in key development goals adopted by world leaders at the start of the millennium, including the lifting of more than 1 billion people out of extreme poverty.

World Poverty report