June 28, 2006

Stat of the Day: India’s Middle Class

Filed under: Economy, Taxes & Government — TBlumer @ 3:22 pm

Val McQueen at TCS Daily has a great column on India today.

India has discovered capitalism, and its economy has broken relatively free of statist shackles and backward thinking. As one might expect, India’s middle class continues to swell:

In the mid-1980s, India’s middle class comprised just 10 percent of the population. Today, it’s larger than the entire population of the United States and is predicted to grow to 445 million by the end of this decade.

That is roughly 40% of India’s total population of 1.1 billion. Continued progress in the same direction would mean that the world’s former poster child for poverty may be able to eliminate it in roughly 40 years — and perhaps faster, if I am right that most of the growth in the middle class has occurred in the past decade.

Decades of socialism in India failed to bring about what has been achieved in only a couple of decades of free-market capitalism. Who wants to argue about which system is better?

2 Comments

  1. I don’t have a source, but I remember reading that the first time that a middle class became larger than the lower class in numbers in a large country was during the 1950’s right here in the USA.

    Stunning when you think about it.

    India joining the ranks of the fully developed modern countries can only be a good thing for us and the world. They are a strategic counterbalance to both China and the Middle East.

    Comment by dave — June 29, 2006 @ 9:16 am

  2. […] ylinder! Is there a lesson in here somewhere for old Europe? Related: BizzyBlog’s Post on India’s middle class.

    Filed under: General, Business by — Dave @ 11:10 pm

    […]

    Pingback by NixGuy.com » GDP Growth and What It Means — June 29, 2006 @ 11:47 pm

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