scholarly journals MIDDLE CLASS GROWTH AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA – MEASUREMENT, CAUSALITY, INTERACTIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Author(s):  
Oluyele AKINKUGBE ◽  
Karl WOHLMUTH

The paper is about the role of the African middle class as a base for entrepreneurship development. The key question is what the growth of the African middle class means for the emergence of an entrepreneurial class in Africa. In this context, the «missing middle» in Africa, the gap in small and medium sized companies between microenterprises and large companies, is of interest. So far the theoretical work and the empirical evidence on the relation between middle class growth and entrepreneurship development are quite scarce. First, the main concepts of defining and measuring the African middle class - via income and consumption, assets, vulnerability, and livelihoods - will be discussed. These differences in definition and measurement have implications for the assumed developmental implications of the growth of the African middle class and the growth of an entrepreneurial class. There are so many statements in the literature about the developmental potentials and the impacts of the African middle class. It is argued that the African middle class is a seedbed of entrepreneurship and management staff; a base for start-ups and high tech companies; that it has an impact on market competition and labour mobility; an impact on level and structure of consumption and marketing, on housing, car and finance markets; an impact on local saving, local investment and on a more long-term investment behaviour; a role in developing a new consumer society based on higher quality and branded goods; a role in participation, empowerment and the formation of economic interest groups; a role in the redistribution of income, assets and economic power; that it leads to a widespread use of new technologies and has a tremendous role in technology diffusion; that it is creating space for upward mobility and societal change; that it pushes the transition from survival firms to growth-oriented firms; that it has a role in pushing for more rational economic policies and that it is also demanding public goods and fair taxation; and that it is providing stability to the political regime, etc. Most of these arguments lack so far empirical evidence, and there is tremendous speculation and experimentation based on the way of defining and measuring the African middle class and the entrepreneurial class which is coming forth on this basis. A main instrument used for this endeavour is aggregation of some few data over Africa; but this is not enough to draw strong conclusions. Second, the scarce evidence on the assumed role of the African middle class as a seedbed of entrepreneurship and managerial competencies is discussed and evaluated. The main issue is the role of the African middle class in overcoming the «missing middle» of small and medium sized companies. There is a general discussion about Africa’s «missing middle», the assumed gap in terms of small and medium sized companies between the many mostly informal microenterprises and the large public and private companies. It is argued that the concepts of the African middle class used in the literature and the ways of defining and measuring it do not allow a deep investigation of entrepreneurship development and the identification of a growing entrepreneurial class in Africa. The main reason is that the economic lives of the various segments of the African middle class are so different. Also, the poor and the rich classes in Africa have distinct economic lives which partly overlap with those of lower and upper segments of the African middle class. Third, there is a lack of differentiating the African middle class with regard of the potential for entrepreneurship development, the establishment of entrepreneurial value systems (education, health, saving and investing), and the role in developing local industries (based on increasing middle class consumption). Any change towards the development of growth oriented small and medium-sized enterprises - between survival and micro enterprises at the lower end and large capitalist and conglomerate enterprises at the upper end - is of interest. Most important is to know more about the role of the African middle class in developing growth-oriented enterprises. It is also of interest to see how governments in Africa can support entrepreneurship and management competences based on specific African middle class segments, along with strategies to use the entrepreneurial potential of the poor and the rich classes. The purpose of the paper is to give evidence on the developmental role of the African Middle Class, by focussing on the «missing middle» of enterprises in Africa and the types of entrepreneurship being associated with the growth of the middle class. After the Introduction in Section 1 there is in Section 2 a discussion on Defining and Measuring the African Middle Class: What about Developmental Implications and Prospects? In Section 3 is a presentation on Africa’s Middle Class and the «Missing Middle» of Enterprises: New Potentials for the Growth of Enterprises? In Section 4 there are Conclusions and Policy Recommendations. This is an economists’ view, but much more interdisciplinary work is needed to cover the issues (and this is done in the collection of essays by Henning Melber, Editor, 2016).

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!


Author(s):  
K. K. Yadav ◽  
Kumud Dhanwantri

In the present age of industrialization and unregulated urbanization, the Aravali ranges in India are facing deforestation and degradation. The major reasons behind this are the needs of the poor, and greed of the rich. Therefore, part of the Aravalli Ranges falling in different sub-regions of the National Capital Region, has been taken as case study. The chapter intends to provide an insight into the scenario of forests and wildlife in the sub-regions; the challenges, responses, and immediate initiatives taken up by the constituent state governments. It also discusses ways forward to engage the governments and local communities in the protection of forests and wildlife. The conclusion strives to provide probable strategies that can be adopted to transform the transitions of Aravalli into a positive one and ways for engaging government machinery for better governance to escape the grim future we foresee.


2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Jose Gregory ◽  
Gnanapriya Chidambaranathan ◽  
Padma Kumar

This article discusses the socio-economic impact of mobile telephony in a developing country like India. Emerging markets are experiencing technology leapfrogging in terms of telecom evolution and adaptation. While the rich and affluent use mobile technology to enhance their lifestyle, for the poor, mobile based applications can augment their daily livelihood. Due to economic compulsions, the focus of the market has been on mobile services and applications that belong to the primary category. This paper identifies the potential of livelihood enabling applications and describes successful global projects in livelihood enabling mobile applications in areas like mHealth, mEducation, mAgriculture, and mFinance. The paper concludes by identifying a set of challenges for developing livelihood enabling mobile apps in India and makes policy suggestions that can increase the viability of such mobile applications in India.


2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN ROWLINGSON ◽  
STUART CONNOR

AbstractThere is a long tradition in social policy of discussing and critiquing the notion of ‘deservingness’ in relation to ‘the poor’. This paper will apply such debates to ‘the rich’ to consider the grounds on which this group might be considered ‘deserving’. The paper identifies three sets of arguments. The first set of arguments concerns the appropriateness of rewarding merit/hard work/effort/risk-taking etc. The second concerns more consequentialist/economic arguments about providing incentives for wealth creation. And the third considers the character and behaviour of the rich. As well as discussing the potential criteria for deservingness, the paper will also debate whether the degree of income and wealth gained by the rich is deserved. Finally, the paper will discuss the social policy implications, including taxation policies, which emerge from this debate.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Morelli ◽  
Huanxing Yang ◽  
Lixin Ye

In an economy where agents have different productivities and mobility, we compare a unified nonlinear optimal taxation with the equilibrium taxation that would be chosen by two competing tax authorities if the same economy were divided into two states. The overall level of progressivity and redistribution is unambiguously lower under competitive taxation; the “rich” are always in favor of competing authorities, whereas the “poor” are always in favor of unified taxation; the preferences of the middle class depend on the initial conditions in terms of the distribution of abilities, the relative power of the various classes, and mobility costs. (JEL D72, H21, H23, H24)


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Roth ◽  
Elisabeth Hahn ◽  
Frank M. Spinath

We analyzed the effect of income inequality on Germans’ life satisfaction considering factors explaining the mechanism of this relationship. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for the years 1984 to 2012, we found a negative relationship between national-level income disparity and average life satisfaction, meaning that people felt happier in years with lower inequality. The effect was completely mediated by economic worries, which increased with rising inequality and in turn reduced people’s satisfaction. However, people’s reaction to inequality depended on their income level: Considering the direct effect of inequality, higher income disparity was clearly detrimental only for the poor and the middle class. Moreover, we found a significant mediation through economic worries for the middle class but not for the poor. The rich showed a more complex pattern of interrelations with both, positive and negative effects of inequality when controlling for economic worries.


2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIËLLE TEEUWEN

ABSTRACTIn many localities in the Dutch Republic, charitable collections were the single largest source of income for relief institutions for the outdoor poor. This article takes into account both the role of the authorities organising collections and the role of the city-dwellers making charitable donations. It is demonstrated that people from almost all layers of urban society contributed to the collections. By means of thorough planning and exerting social pressure, religious and secular administrators of poor relief tried to maximise Dutch generosity. They presented making charitable donations as a duty of the rich as well as of the less well-off. In the Dutch Republic, not only the elites, but also the middling groups of society, who approximately constituted almost half of the urban population, were of vital importance in financing poor relief.


2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SKILLING ◽  
JESSICA McLAY

AbstractThe high level of academic, public and policy attention paid to the deservingness of the poor and (especially) of welfare recipients contrasts with the scant attention paid to the deservingness – or otherwise – of the rich. This discrepancy reflects socially dominant – but contestable – ideas about equality of opportunity and the role of individual merit within market systems. In this journal, Karen Rowlingson, Stewart Connor and Michael Orton have noted that wealth and riches have remained invisible as policy ‘problems’. This invisibility is socially important, in that policy efforts to address current, socially damaging, levels of economic inequality require attention to the deservingness of the rich, as well as of the poor. This article draws on recent survey data from New Zealand to provide new insights into public attitudes to the rich. It finds that the New Zealand public view the rich as more individually deserving of their outcomes than the poor are deserving of social assistance, and that attitudes towards the rich are related to redistributive sentiments at least as strongly as attitudes towards the poor. In concluding, the article reflects on the limitations of existing data sources and makes suggestions for future research.


Author(s):  
Camilla Rosengaard

The last ten years of growth in the Indian economy has nurtured dreams of the ‘good life’ among both the rich and the poor in the city of Mumbai (Bombay). The city and the home are important scenes in which the realizations of this metropolis’ 16 million inhabitants are played out. Whilst the middle classes, to an ever growing extent, realize dreams of the good life, inspired by the tranquil suburban life of the Western middle-class, the underclass must employ other life strategies in their attempt to turn dreams into reality.  


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