Poverty, social mobility, and the middle class: the case of South Africa

Abstract

The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a structured overview of a wide array of definitions of the middle class that have been suggested in the economics literature, and assesses their strengths and shortcomings using South Africa as a case study. Contrary to most standard approaches in the economic realm, the main argument this dissertation make...