Moderate prosperity, an adaptation of the middle class concept to a Malagasy rural area: the case of Itasy

Abstract

In order to adapt the controversial sociological concept of ‘Middle Class’ to an African agriculture-based economy, exemplified by Madagascar, we propose the concept of Moderate Prosperity. As a case study, we use detailed data from 508 households in the 2008 Itasy Observatory. We stratify them using four distinguishing socio-economic factors: household income quintile, head of household’s education level, income structure and land tenure. We describe four Moderate Prosperity clusters that reflect the agro-economic diversity of the Itasy region: a vulnerable group of agriculturally diversified households in the third income quintile with locally issued land title; an emerging group of skilled, polyculture farmers belonging to both the lowest and highest quintiles; a traditional group of uneducated rice farmers in the fourth quintile with traditional land ownership; and an upper group of educated livestock farmers, non-agricultural independents and workers, belonging to the top income quintile with locally issued land title.

Keywords:

• Social stratification
• African middle class
• moderate prosperity
• rural Madagascar
• clustering methods

JEL:

• C38
• O55
• Q12
• Z13

Notes

¹ Defined as people earning between $12 and $50 a day.

² People with a daily consumption of between $2 and $4.

³ In this article, we use the term ‘Moderate Prosperity’ to mean the same thing as ‘Small Prosperity’ (Darbon and Toulabour 2013) which is a direct translation of the French term ‘Petite Prospérité’ (Darbon 2012).

⁴ World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org/.

⁵ ROR: Réseau des Observatoires Ruraux.

⁶ For instance, the World Bank (2007) and Milanovic and Yitzhaki (2002) use the daily income range between $12 and $50. Ravallion (2010), Banerjee and Duflo (2008) and the African Development Bank (2011) propose a lower boundary of $2.

⁷ The most common definitions use the interval between 75 and 125% of the median income (Birdsall et al. 2000; Pressman 2007) while some others consider the middle three quintiles of the income distribution (Easterly 2001).

⁸ Department for International Development: see the public document http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/DOC59.pdf.

⁹ The RuralStruc Program analyses and compares liberalization processes and their impacts on agriculture and the rural sector in seven developing countries (Mexico, Nicaragua, Morocco, Senegal, Mali, Kenya and Madagascar).

¹⁰ Alaotra is also known as the rice granary of Madagascar.

¹¹ We report the total annual gross household income divided by the number of its members. Rural households typically have various sources of income from their members’ activities and a large degree of self-sufficiency based on their own production. The gross household income was thus computed by combining incomes from non-farm activities, agricultural wages and remittances with the value of the production consumed by the household and sales of all farm produce in 2008.

¹² 4$ and 12$ are, respectively, the lower boundary of the African ‘lower middle class’ (African Development Bank 2011) and the GMC (World Bank 2007).

¹³ Maize–bean intercropping and crop rotations alternating root crops (cassava) and seed plants (rice) are often practised in Itasy (Réseau des Observatoires Ruraux 2008).