ABSTRACT
In the past few years, considerable attention by the popular press and by international agencies has been given to what is considered the ‘new’ middle class in developing countries (see e.g. World Bank 2007, Asian Development Bank 2010). As part of shifting global economic power structures a new group of Southern beneficiaries of globalization has become more visible and has gained growing international attention. This ‘new’ or ‘Southern’ middle class is often used as a term to describe how the benefits of globalization reach larger parts of the population in the Global South (see e.g. Fernandes and Heller 2006, Kharas 2010). Research on this new, Southern, middle class has so far mainly been within the realm of the work of international agencies, consultancy firms and international banks. Academic research on the emergence of a new middle class in developing countries is, with some exceptions, still limited. Some studies have noted that members of the new middle class are mostly working in knowledge-intensive jobs in the private sector: information technology (IT), the banking sector or other business services (see Fuller and Narasimhan 2007, Murphy 2011, Krishnan in this volume). In the Philippines, the country occupying centre stage in this chapter, the sustained growth of the ITES-BPO (IT-enabled business process outsourcing) sector has been perceived to fuel the growth of a new middle class that drives private consumption, notably the consumption of non-essential miscellaneous goods and services (World Bank 2013).
