Friday, July 29, 2011

Middle Class Identity in Mexico

From earlier this week:
Although 81 percent of the Mexican population declares itself middle class, only three out of every ten people are in that social level, says the consulting firm De la Riva Group.
During the presentation of the report The Middle Class in Mexico, the director of syndicated studies of the business specializing in market analysis, Priscila Arámburu, explained that people in that economic condition are made up of two segments, one of which is integrated by people with household earnings of 13,500 to 40,599 pesos a month, and a group whose salaries extend from a range of 40,600 to 98,499 per month.

The above indicates that close to 35.8 million of 112.3 million Mexicans in the country are in that social stratus.
That is a rather upward view of middle class, which of course shrinks it a bit. Someone earning well over a million pesos a year is typically considered rich, but the more significant difference in terms of the number of people it impacts is at the lower end. The government's bottom limit for poverty is 1,900 pesos a month in the city, 1,200 in the countryside, a small fraction of the De la Riva estimate. Such an expansive view of the middle class means that according to the government, there are a much smaller number of poor people, but as a practical matter, a household earning 6,000 pesos a month does not seem middle class to me.


Jan-Albert Hootsen said...

It's an interesting discussion: where does the struggling working class end and the middle class making a decent earning begin? Back in 2008 a sociologist in Guadalajara told me at a conference at the UdeG that, in Mexico, the middle class is more psychological than economical. Funny thing is: when I was in Guatemala last year, some of my friends there who had income levels that in Mexico would easily be considered (lower) middle class insisted on being poor people :-P

pc said...

Yeah it's a hard one to figure out. How much of it is relative to your neighbors, how much of it is just based on salary vs. the average price of a 3-bedroom house, the economy food budget x 3, et cetera? I dunno, there's certainly no perfect measure. It's also odd that the same effect you talk about in Guatemala is also true in the US (ie poor people who would be middle class in Mx) and I can only assume most developed nations. That makes you suspect that middle classism is even more aspirational in Mexico than in most nations.