Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class.

• Author: Lee, Alexander
• Position: FURTHER READING - Brief article - Book review

ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE RISE OF THE LATIN AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS

Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Julian Messina, Jamele Rigolini, Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva, Maria Ana Lugo, and Renos Vakis

(Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2012), 200 pages.

In Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class, a panel of six authors from the World Bank examine a plethora of socioeconomic data from the Latin American and Caribbean region as a way of looking at the trends and implications for class mobility in the region. Authors Francisco Ferreira, Julian Messina, Jamele Rigolini, Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva, Maria Ana Lugo, and Renos Vakis first clarify their definition of class in Latin American society and look more closely at class mobility both within and across generations.

The authors state outright that they do not aim to infer causality from the data they compile and produce. This is a significant drawback of the text which reads most often as a fairly dry and lengthy compilation report as each chapter could be read standalone for the data...