ABSTRACT
Introduction In this chapter, I set out basic information on the middle class for eight countries in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, over the past two decades. The middle class is identified as people living in households with income per capita between $10 and $50 per day, in purchasing power parity dollars. This income-based identification, summarized below, is explained and justified in the World Bank report on mobility and the middle class (Ferreira et al. 2013). It is conceptually and empirically grounded in the analysis of household surveys and is meant to apply region-wide.
