Africa’s rising middle class: Development, mobility, and the path to inclusive growth
The emergence of middle-class populations represents a critical demographic transition with profound implications for social stratification, mobility patterns, and economic development across African societies. This study examines the bidirectional relationship between economic development and middle-class expansion over 2000–2020, investigating whether development drives middle-class formation or whether middle-class growth catalyzes broader development outcomes. Using an unbalanced panel of 44 African countries observed at five-year intervals (approximately 196 country-year observations), we employ a two-step system generalized method of moments estimator to simultaneously address endogeneity, control for unobserved country heterogeneity through fixed effects, and capture the dynamic persistence of middle-class formation. We focus on populations with daily expenditures between $2 and $20, disaggregated into the floating class ($2–$4), lower-middle class ($4–$10), and upper-middle class ($10–$20). Our panel findings reveal that per capita income growth robustly drives the expansion of floating and lower-middle-class segments within countries over time, whereas the relationship weakens for upper-middle-class segments—a result that holds after including country and time fixed effects. Significant persistence in middle-class formation (coefficients 0.451–0.567) confirms path dependence and underscores the cumulative nature of development. Regional heterogeneity analysis demonstrates significant differences between North African and Sub-Saharan African countries. Income inequality and multidimensional poverty independently constrain middle-class formation, indicating that growth alone is insufficient for broad-based middle-class development.
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