Asia's developing middle class

The prospect for a greater Asian middle class seems to be increasingly optimistic even in the two great countries of India and China. Interesting. This will have great repercussions. If the world's greatest production region becomes the world's greatest consuming region (due to the buying power of the increased middle class), you are seeing a relatively autonomous market and this will have a big impact on regionalism.

In an article published in the East Asian Forum, Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution observed that: e

Asia today has a middle class of around 560 million people, of which 230 million are in the rich economies of Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and Taiwan (China). The rest live in emerging economies. This latter group is growing very fast as these economies grow. In China, because of the low share of labour in GDP and very low rates of household expenditure, the middle class is small — perhaps only 12 percent of the population — compared to what one would expect from an economy at its level of development. India also has a small middle class by global standards, only about 5 percent of its population, because it is still a rather poor country. But the middle class in both China and India is growing at extraordinary rates. If China is successful in its policy ambition to foster wage growth at least as fast as GDP growth, and if it continues to grow at its potential, its middle class could swell to 50 percent of its population in just 12 years. India’s middle class could rise even more rapidly because Indian households benefit more from Indian growth than do Chinese households, given the prevailing distribution of income.

While the two Asian giants are obviously the most important drivers of the aggregate numbers of growth in the Asian middle class, the exciting possibility is that many large South and East Asian countries could enjoy the same kind of prosperity — Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are poised to become predominantly middle class countries within a decade to 15 years.

Full article here.

Where is the Philippines in all these? I wonder if our elites see the dilemma of a increasingly middle class Asia with the Philippines maintaining a tight pyramidal structure.

I wonder if we'll all wake up and realize it's also "bad for business."

We'd become an Asian developmental pariah in terms of the underdevelopment of the middle class.