As the team at Heron continues to think about how people in the U.S. can move out of poverty and into the middle class, we appreciate tuning in to conversations like this one to understand what kind of opportunities for mobility are actually available to the poor. There is some debate going around about emerging markets and their “fragile” middle classes, and it’s presented concisely here on the World Weekly broadcast from the Financial Times, where Gideon Rachman, Ferdinando Giugliano, Shawn Donnan and James Kynge discuss the nascent middle class in different countries and its prospects in the face of slowing growth.
A summary of the podcast from the Financial Times blog:
Decades of rapid growth have created a new middle class in the developing world, prompting multinational companies to invest heavily in emerging markets as they attempt to serve millions of new consumers. But rising inequality and slowing growth has presented a risk to this new middle class and is forcing companies to rethink their strategy.
For further reading, the Financial Times is doing a series on the middle class. You can check out also more World Weekly episodes here.