Middle Class Consensus, Social Capital and the Mechanics of Economic Development

Middle Class Consensus, Social Capital and the Mechanics of Economic Development PDF Author: Stefan Dietrich Josten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Middle Class Consensus, Social Capital and the Mechanics of Economic Development

Middle Class Consensus, Social Capital and the Mechanics of Economic Development PDF Author: Stefan Dietrich Josten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description


The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development

The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development PDF Author: William Easterly
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Capital humano
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war (putting ethnic minorities at risk), more social "modernization," and more democracy.

The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development

The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development PDF Author: William Easterly
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 41

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Book Description
A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war (putting ethnic minorities at risk), more social modernization, and more democracy. Modern political economy stresses society's polarization as a determinant of development outcomes. Among the most common forms of social conflict are class polarization and ethnic polarization.A middle class consensus is defined as a high share of income for the middle class and a low degree of ethnic polarization. A middle class consensus distinguishes development successes from failures. A theoretical model shows how groups - distinguished by class or ethnicity - will under-invest in human capital and infrastructure when there is leakage to another group.Easterly links the existence of a middle class consensus to exogenous country characteristics such as resource endowments, along the lines of the provocative thesis of Engerman and Sokoloff 1997 that tropical commodity exporters are more unequal than other societies.Easterly confirms this hypothesis with cross-country data. This makes it possible to use resource endowments as instruments for inequality. A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war (putting ethnic minorities at risk), more social modernization, and more democracy.This paper - a product of Macroeconomics and Growth, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study the determinants of growth.

Stemming Middle-Class Decline

Stemming Middle-Class Decline PDF Author: Nancey Green Leigh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351488104
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Are Americans as well-off as they used to be? The answer affects everything from product markets and housing sales to social tranquility and presidential (and local) elections. This volume examines what is happening to the American middle class. In a detailed and comprehensive analysis, Nancey Green Leigh tracks changes in the pattern of income distribution over a twenty-year period. While earnings have increased, there is a widening gap between what middle-level earnings can purchase and the cost of a middle standard of living.Due to the fact that this decline has not been experienced equally in all regions, separate analyses are reported for urban and rural locations, major census regions, and the largest states. To identify which workers have been most affected, Leigh compares earning trends by race, gender, educational level, industry of employment, part- or full-time status, and fringe benefit recipiency. Rejecting short-term and demographic explanations, Leigh links the decline of the middle class to economic change and industrial restructuring.Leigh concludes her work by examining planning and policy prescriptions to improve the prospects of members - and aspiring members - of the middle economic class. She documents the decreasing ability of middle-level earners to purchase a middle standard of living and attributes the decline in part to failures in planning. Failures of planning, she observes, have contributed to the growing divergence between middle-level earnings and the middle standard of living. Stemming Middle-Class Decline provides comprehensive data and trends on workers, communities, regions, and the nation that all policymakers and government officials should read and examine with care.

Social Contracts Under Stress

Social Contracts Under Stress PDF Author: Olivier Zunz
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610445724
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
The years following World War II saw a huge expansion of the middle classes in the world's industrialized nations, with a significant part of the working class becoming absorbed into the middle class. Although never explicitly formalized, it was as though a new social contract called for government, business, and labor to work together to ensure greater political freedom and more broadly shared economic prosperity. For the most part, they succeeded. In Social Contracts Under Stress, eighteen experts from seven countries examine this historic transformation and look ahead to assess how the middle class might fare in the face of slowing economic growth and increasing globalization. The first section of the book focuses on the differing experiences of Germany, Britain, France, the United States, and Japan as they became middle-class societies. The British working classes, for example, were slowest to consider themselves middle class, while in Japan by the 1960s, most workers had abandoned working-class identity. The French remain more fragmented among various middle classes and resist one homogenous entity. Part II presents compelling evidence that the rise of a huge middle class was far from inclusive or free of social friction. Some contributors discuss how the social contract reinforced long-standing prejudices toward minorities and women. In the United States, Ira Katznelson writes, Southern politicians used measures that should have promoted equality, such as the GI bill, to exclude blacks from full access to opportunity. In her review of gender and family models, Chiara Saraceno finds that Mediterranean countries have mobilized the power of the state to maintain a division of labor between men and women. The final section examines what effect globalization might have on the middle class. Leonard Schoppa's careful analysis of the relevant data shows how globalization has pushed "less skilled workers down and more skilled workers up out of a middle class that had for a few decades been home to both." Although Europe has resisted the rise of inequality more effectively than the United States or Japan, several contributors wonder how long that resistance can last. Social Contracts Under Stress argues convincingly that keeping the middle class open and inclusive in the face of current economic pressures will require a collective will extending across countries. This book provides an invaluable guide for assessing the issues that must be considered in such an effort.

Social Capital and Economic Development

Social Capital and Economic Development PDF Author: Jonathan Isham
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781781950388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The chapters in this volume explore the challenges and opportunities raised by this concept for researchers, practitioners and teachers. Social Capital and Economic Development is based upon a consistent, policy-based vision of how social capital affects well-being in developing countries.

The Middle Class in World Society

The Middle Class in World Society PDF Author: Christian Suter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000076210
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This volume delves into the study of the world’s emerging middle class. With essays on Europe, the United States, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the book studies recent trends and developments in middle class evolution at the global, regional, national, and local levels. It reconsiders the conceptualization of the middle class, with a focus on the diversity of middle class formation in different regions and zones of world society. It also explores middle class lifestyles and everyday experiences, including experiences of social mobility, feelings of insecurity and anxiety, and even middle class engagement with social activism. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the book provides a sophisticated analysis of this new and rapidly expanding socioeconomic group and puts forth some provocative ideas for intellectual and policy debates. It will be of importance to students and researchers of sociology, economics, development studies, political studies, Latin American studies, and Asian Studies.

Social Capital and Economic Development

Social Capital and Economic Development PDF Author: Patrick Francois
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
ISBN: 9780415407014
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
This immensely readable book by Patrick François provides an original insight into the increasingly fashionable topic that is social capital. In a unique, original study, the author emphasises trustworthiness as a vital feature of social capital and argues that standard economic treatments of this phenomenon are inadequate. The book's richer evolutionary treatment of this is embedded in a neoclassical model and will prove to be essential reading for economic development scholars as well as those interested in development studies and economic thought in general.

Hollowed Out

Hollowed Out PDF Author: David Madland
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520961706
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
For the past several decades, politicians and economists thought that high levels of inequality were good for the economy. But because America’s middle class is now so weak, the US economy suffers from the kinds of problems that plague less-developed countries. As Hollowed Out explains, to have strong, sustainable growth, the economy needs to work for everyone and expand from the middle out. This new thinking has the potential to supplant trickle-down economics—the theory that was so wrong about inequality and our economy—and shape economic policymaking for generations.

The Vanishing Middle Class, new epilogue

The Vanishing Middle Class, new epilogue PDF Author: Peter Temin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.