Economic mobility and the rise of the Latin American middle class

After decades of stagnation, the size of the middle class in Latin America and the Caribbean recently expanded by 50 percent from 103 million people in 2003 to 152 million (or 30 percent of the continent's population) in 2009. Over the same period, as household incomes grew and inequality edged downward in most countries, the proportion of people in poverty fell markedly: from 44 percent to 30 percent. As a result, the middle class and the poor...