mexico is a middle class country

It is not the first time I have heard the mis-representation.

This morning while I was scanning the local Facebook pages, I was struck by the number of times people referred to Mexico as being "a third-world country" or "poor" or "lacking adequate medical services."

The topic was the recent wave of The Virus that is sweeping through the local villages, but I have heard the same comments during discussions about other aspects of life in Mexico. One commenter went so far as to claim Mexico was "one of the poorest countries in the world because every family has at least seven kids."

I am not certain where all of that comes from -- false comparisons with Canada and The States are undoubtedly one source. But each of those characterizations is simply false.

This is modern Mexico.

• Mexico has the 12th or 15th largest economy in the world -- depending on how the figure is calculated. Better yet, by purchasing power, it has the 11th largest economy in the world.
  
  
• Mexico's fertility rate, once very high prior to the 1960s, is only 2.1. The creation of a strong middle class has had the same effect as it has had in other countries with an emerging middle class -- births drop. Without immigration, Mexico could barely break even with births and deaths.
  
  
• Mexico is not a third-world country. It is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club for mainly rich nations. And its economy justifies that membership.
  
  
• Terms like "third-world" are remnants of the world's colonial past. The World Bank classifies Mexico as "upper-middle income."

That is not to say that Mexico does not have its problems. And a lot of those problems (infrastructure, education) are a direct result of the lack of taxation. Mexico's government takes the lowest percentage of GDP as taxation of any OECD member -- 18.8%.

I am always a bit baffled when I hear people describe some of my neighbors as being "poor" when they are clearly middle class. Maybe that is because the boundaries of class are always nebulous.

The OECD defines middle class as earning 75% to 200% of the median income in the country where they live. For Mexico, that would be a range of 75,000 to 200,000 pesos each year. Or $3,757 to $10,019 (US) annually.

To Canadians and Americans those figures seem low. That is partly due to the fact that we come from countries that are equivalent of the economic Amazons and Googles of the world. To our Mexican neighbors, we are all Jeff Bezos. 

Based on those calculations, during the past few decades, Mexico has grown a solid middle class. Prior to the outbreak of The Virus, Mexico's population was classified as 55% middle class, 19% rich, and 36% poor. 

The Virus has changed everything. Because of it, Mexico's economy is currently suffering its worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Mexican government, with a historically-based aversion to debt, did very little to assist workers or businesses. As a result, Mexicans dropped out of the middle class faster than freshmen from an Aristotelian Logic class.

No one is certain yet how the recession has affected the absolute size of the Mexican middle class. We do know that the net size of the middle class in Latin America was reduced by at least 4.7 million people. Mexico most likely has suffered a disproportionate loss in that group.

That is what is so ironic about people referring to Mexico as a "third-world" country and being "poor." It is not.

But The Virus has offered proof of how tenuous progress can be. Mexico's people were in a much better position economically to handle the ravages of the current waves of disease than it would have been 50 years ago with a primarily low-income population.

We should be celebrating the success of our Mexican neighbors. And be a bit more sensitive to the adjectives we apply in this country we call home.