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In a recent speech in New York, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton revealed her campaign would focus on the struggling American middle class. But is she really committing herself to a programme of structural economic reform? 

While inequality is the flipside of the ‘squeezed-out middle’, the trends affecting the middle class and inequality are inextricably bound up with changes in the labour market in Europe.

The hard knocks being suffered by the European middle class are leading to shifts in the political landscape of Europe. The causes date back to long before the financial crisis of 2008. It is therefore an illusion to hope that this dip is temporar...

‘The squeezed-out middle’ - a concept that mainly appears in American debates but which, as The Broker’s dossier shows, applies increasingly to Europe - is in fact the flipside of inequality.

The Broker has launched a new dossier: The European Middle Class under the programme Inclusive Economy Europe.

Today’s Europe seems barely equipped to tackle the challenges of the twenty-first century. It is time to lay a new political, economic and financial foundation for the European project.

Europe’s economic progress and political stability after the Second World War would not have been possible without the rise of the European middle class. This dossier shows that further progress and stability is seriously under threat, partly due...

Import competition, offshoring and automation are threatening the middle classes in Europe. New jobs have been created mainly for the lower and the upper segments of the labour market. But not for the middle. And because most of those jobs are in...

Occupational change in itself cannot explain the decline of the European middle class. But it could be a threat to its sociopolitical foundations

After Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, the breakdown of financial markets caused significant losses for investors with savings in risky assets. These investment decisions were often based on bad, or at least incautious, advice from financial experts....

As technology advances, automation will affect a growing number of European jobs. The conventional view is that education is the key to avoiding unemployment, falling wages and stagnation. This view is undermined, however, by the failure of high-w...

The middle class is not a homogeneous group. The segments within it respond differently to economic globalization, with the lower middle class heading towards the poorest. Although social protection schemes can go a long way to compensate for thei...

The much-debated squeeze of the middle class in Europe is real, but very different from country to country. The squeeze is felt most in the countries most affected by the financial crisis, like Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece, where austerity me...

Robots have long been part of the world around us, but soon there really will be no avoiding them – when they no longer only work for us, but also with us. How are we going to do that together?  

Technology is likely to substantially reshape labour markets in the future, dramatically altering the kinds of skills that middle-class workers will need. As such, policymakers must act now.

The international discussion on the middle class is taking place on many levels. The table here contains a number of institutional reports, research papers and other sources that The Broker’s editors have found useful in preparing the Middle Class...

Economic growth in the newly emerging economies is accompanied by obscene disparities between rich and poor.

In response to Seth Kaplan: shifting from externally designed to local solutions, and from seeing poverty as isolated to the periphery to it being interconnected with the global economy and its inequalities.

The EADI conference has closed its doors. What the conference has shown us is that the debate on inequality and the rise of the middle class in developing countries opens many windows of opportunity to reframe development and development policy as...

Can global citizenship flourish in an era of increased competition between the middle classes in the North and the South?

The Broker had the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Birdsall, president of the Centre for Global Development, at the EADI conference. She has often asked herself  who you call middle class? And what does the rise of the middle class mean for de...

The bright picture of Africa’s economy is that it is growing and that inequality is declining. However, as Stefano Prato of the Society for International Development (SID) said at the beginning of a panel session at the EADI conference, not all Af...

A social contract may offer a sound basis for responsible development. Power relations are crucial.

It is questionable whether the middle classes in Southern Africa can be perceived as drivers of economic and societal change.

The rise of the middle classes in emerging and developing countries has implications on different levels. Their role in democratization processes is not unambiguous and, as the first plenary session of the conference made clear, depends partly on...

During the EADI conference, The Broker had an exclusive interview with Branko Milanovic, Professor at the City University New York and economist for the World Bank specialized in inequality.

Apart from being a media partner at the EADI conference The Broker also took part, presenting a panel on inequality and the post-2015 agenda. During a session of almost two hours the panel provided an update on global inequality trends, based on t...

Using Ostrom’s work on managing the commons, and more recent interest-based and discursive institutionalism, this paper seeks to reveal the interests behind and fallacy of the discourse used by the state, with support from segments of capital, to...

The EADI General Conference started its first full day on 24 June with a plenary panel on the middle classes. It emerged that perspectives on the middle classes are very different in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe.

In the opening lecture of the 14th General Conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), Professor of International Development at the UK’s Open University Raphael Kaplinsky addressed the challenges...

Follow The Broker at the EADI general conference “Responsible Development in a Polycentric World: Inequality, Citizenship and the Middle Classes”.

The global development framework for the coming years cannot ignore global inequality if it should constitute a relevant and legitimate set of development goals in a globalised world.

For a national policy maker it is possible to think about raising the income levels of the bottom 10% or 20% toward the middle of the distribution. The poorest can be brought nearer the poverty line through measures like cash transfers.

Given the over-sensitivity of the Gini to the middle of the distribution, and the insensitivity of the Palma, policymakers could consider a choice between the two: which aspect of the distribution are you more concerned with?

On why the post-2015 agenda should include a goal to limit the negative characteristics of inequality and how indicators of income concentration are better suited for this. One proposal that could be used is the Palma index.

Inequalities within countries are largely ignored in the UN climate negotiations. This must change, but the global poor should be spared.

The specification of a new international income inequality goal will certainly be difficult. However, if rich-country fears of “the rise of the rest” can be replaced with a common commitment to a new economic and ecological convergence, global equ...

Editor Evert-jan Quak comments and reflects on new research, publications, blog posts, conferences and current affairs in the field of inclusive and sustainable economy.

What is it like to grow up male and middle class in a city where everyone sees a career in information technology (IT) as the road to success? Nicholas Nisbett, a social anthropologist, hung out at a cybercafé in Bangalore popular with young men a...