Feeling Poor, Feeling Rich, or Feeling Middle-Class : An Empirical Investigation

Bussolo, Maurizio ; Lebrand, Mathilde ; Torre, Ivan

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: INEQUALITY;    SUBJECTIVE RANKING;    WELL-BEING;    POVERTY;    MIDDLE CLASS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-9456
RP-ID  :  WPS9456

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Based on their objective economicsituation and comparing with their peers, individuals formperceptions of their economic position in a society. Datafrom the three waves of the Life in Transition surveys ofEuropean countries show that these perceptionssystematically deviate from the rankings obtained usingconsumption levels. People position themselves in the middleranks in larger numbers than those who are in the middleranks according to their consumption levels.Correspondingly, many people who objectively are classifiedin the top, richest, or bottom, poorest, ranks subjectivelyfeel that they are in the middle class. This puzzling"bunching in the middle" is the focus of thispaper. Explanations are tested and discarded that considersubjective perceptions as misperceptions or the result ofother mistakes due to data limitations (such as tail bias).The paper concludes that rather than reflecting a subjectiveassessment of the distribution of welfare, subjectiverankings reveal subjective economic well-being. The papershow that monetary consumption is a strong predictor ofsubjective economic well-being, but that the latter isinfluenced by many other factors, including economicsecurity, proxied by employment status or other measures ofhuman capital, such as health and education. These findingshave policy relevance, since redistribution measures aimingat simply protecting consumption levels may not besufficient to restore the economic well-being provided byhaving full-time secure types of employment.