“According to World Bank data, the middle class now outnumbers the poor in Mexico. The calculation is based on World Bank income thresholds for upper-middle-income countries.”
Mexico News Daily reports:
The Mexican government on Friday said that for the first time in history, more Mexicans are categorized as middle class than as living in poverty…Based on World Bank data the Mexican middle class grew by more than 12 percentage points between 2018 and 2024.
‘These figures coincide with [our own] data indicating a reduction in poverty,’ Ramírez said, referencing the August national statistics agency [INEGI] report that poverty was reduced from 41.9% of the population in 2018 to 29.6% by last year.
The August INEGI report found that the number of Mexicans living in poverty declined from 51.9 million in 2018 to 38.5 million in 2024.
The actual growth of Mexico’s middle class may be slower than the Mexican government claims. But it is real, driven by rising incomes in Mexico.
From 2018 to 2024, per capita income rose in Mexico from $20,380 to $24,920 in inflation-adjusted PPP terms.
Mexico’s population growth is now quite slow, so even modest economic growth leads to rising incomes. From 2018 to 2024, Mexico’s population rose by less than 1 percent per year, going from 124.6 million to 130.9 million. Mexico’s population didn’t grow much faster than America’s: The U.S. population rose from 326.8 million to 340.1 million between 2018 and 2024. In the 1960s and early 1980s, Mexico’s population grew by about 3 percent per year, but Mexico’s birthrate is now less than half of what it was in the 1980s.
In the future, Mexico’s population will eventually fall, unless it experiences substantial immigration. The average Mexican woman now has only 1.87 children, not that far above the 1.62 children the typical American woman has. If women in a country have less than 2 children on average, the country’s population will fall unless there is substantial net immigration into a country.
There is some immigration into Mexico from its poorer Central American neighbors. Incomes are only half as high in Guatemala, the poor Central American country that borders Mexico, as they are in Mexico, which is more prosperous. Mexico restricts immigration and cracks down on illegal immigration. Until recently, Mexico was harsher on migrants than the United States.
Some American expatriates now live in Mexico City and work remotely from there. Mexico City is significantly safer than some major U.S. cities, such as Detroit, New Orleans, and St. Louis. But many other parts of Mexico are quite dangerous and crime-ridden, and plagued by killings by drug gangs that often have local politicians and police on their payroll.
Mexico is not particularly well governed, but it does have less red tape than most countries in the world. Its business and labor regulations are better than the world average, although Mexico is more corrupt than the world average, and has a fairly ineffective judicial system.
