Several hundred million Indians and almost a billion Chinese reached quasi-middle-class living after market reforms
Income rankings trace the rise after India's 1990s opening and China's 1980s market turn.
The Daily Signal · Capitalism Improves Human Lives, Socialism Does the OppositeAccording to an opinion analysis of long-run income data, "After transitioning to a more capitalist economy, several hundred million Indians went from abject poverty to a quasi-middle-class standard of living, and almost a billion Chinese people went from subsistence living to a quasi-middle-class standard of living."
India opened to trade and loosened controls on industry in the early 1990s, and China introduced market policies in the early 1980s. The analysis ranks countries by income per person each year on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 for the richest country that year, using income records from the Maddison Project Database in the Netherlands. It describes the charts for India and China as showing a significant improvement after those changes.
The analysis calls that gain for so many people in so short a time unprecedented in three thousand years of human history.
Questions people ask
What does quasi-middle-class mean here?
It is not an official income bracket. The analysis uses it to mean living above bare subsistence, with more secure food, housing and basic goods, but still below the comfort and security associated with middle-class life in rich countries.
Where do the historical income comparisons come from?
They come from the Maddison Project Database, maintained at the University of Groningen. It reconstructs income per person for many countries over long periods in inflation-adjusted prices, so distant years can be compared.
Why rank countries from 0 to 100 instead of just reporting income?
A rank shows a country's position relative to all other countries in the same year. That makes it easier to see whether India and China were catching up with the rest of the world, rather than just growing in absolute terms.