The degree of choice households have over their consumption expenditure is critical in deciding their economic class. Applying our measure to Egyptian household budget surveys, we estimate the population size of the middle class in Egypt and assess their well-being in the period 1995-2011. Our...

Since the 2000s, economists across fields have increasingly used consumer credit reporting data for research. We introduce readers to the economics of and the institutional details of these data. Using examples from the literature, we provide practical guidance on how to use these data to...

The degree of choice households have over their consumption expenditure is critical in deciding their economic class. Applying our measure to Egyptian household budget surveys, we estimate the population size of the middle class in Egypt and assess their well-being in the period 1995-2011. Our...

This paper reviews the flow approach (income less consumption) to measuring saving and the associated trends in sectoral saving rates for New Zealand, as derived from the national accounts. It also presents estimates for the household sector, of the stock measure of savings (changes in net...

This paper decomposes differences between the official poverty estimates of Malawi and a set of revised estimates by Pauw et al. (2016, forthcoming) with respect to five methodological differences: (i) the use of a revised set of unit conversion factors; (ii) the specification and use of...

Interest in the emergence of a global middle class has resulted in a number of attempts to identify and enumerate who belongs to it . Current research provides wildly different estimates about the size and evolution of the global middle class because of a lack of consensus on appropriate...

We evaluate official saving rate measures in light of the recent decline of NIPA personal saving to effectively zero. We find, like others, that official saving measures are not representative of basic economic concepts, and that various adjusted measures of saving have moved in markedly...

We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate's long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s-2007), and recent substantial increase (2008-2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious ‘buffer stock' model of optimal consumption in the presence of...

As the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) illustrates, there are advantages to measuring consumer expenditures by tracking the authorization of payments by instrument type (cash, check, debit or credit card, etc.). The main advantages of payment diaries appear to be the following: 1)...