Search

The article discusses who in American qualify as the top one percent of the wealthiest Americans in 2012. Information is provided on the profile of the top wealthy who often work in finance, make half of their annual income from interest, dividends, and capital gains, and often have wealthy parents. It is noted that the wealthiest Americans are more likely to be married and have children than middle class or poor Americans.

The article reports that the middle class in Brazil has grown significantly since 2002. Brazil was previously known for the wide gap between its rich and poor populations, but in 2008 the middle class rose to more than half the nation's population. People in Brazil put a high value on status symbols and spend large percentages of their income on fashion and brand name products seen on television shows.

The article discusses three kinds of economic equality in Great Britain: that between rich and poor, between private and public sector workers, and between the rich and the middle class. These inequalities are seen to threaten the Labour government of Gordon Brown and his chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling.

This article focuses on the growth of the middle class in the suburbs of Lima, Peru. Mega Plaza looks pretty much like any shopping mall, with its smart boutiques, a big department store, a multiplex cinema and a huge gym. Next door stands a second mall, Royal Plaza. What makes these duelling malls unusual is where they are: on a congested and dusty stretch of the Panamerican Highway, in what were once shantytowns and today form part of Lima's northern suburbs. When it opened two years ago, Mega Plaza defied the notion that Lima's sprawling, largely self-built suburbs are uniformly poor. Between them, the two malls clocked up sales of $130m last year. Nearly two out of three of Lima's 8m people live in three suburban "cones" that stretch out into the barren sandhills of Peru's coastal desert. Some 2.3m live in the northern cone, the oldest-established and most prosperous. To those who claim that Peru's middle class is dying, Rolando Arellano, a market researcher for Mega Plaza, responds that it is being born anew in Lima North, largely overlooked by the city's business and political elites.