最新财经资讯 第56期 （总第166期） 国际司 2014-4-14 目 录 一、 全球 .docVIP

最 新 财 经 资 讯第期 国际司 2014-4-14 目 录 Fragile Middle: 2.8bn people on the brink FT | April 14, 2014 Muljoko, a 27-year-old cleaner who works in one of Jakarta’s gleaming office towers, has all the trappings of a newly minted member of the middle class. He owns a motorcycle, slings a Sony smartphone and has a futuristic-looking phone-watch strapped to his wrist that he uses to text friends during working hours. He is infinitely better off than when he was growing up in an impoverished farming village in southern Sumatra. Like millions around the world over the past three decades, Muljoko has risen out of poverty and is now a proud member of Asia’s emerging urban middle class. And yet, a closer look at his finances – and his aspirations – reveals that his place in the middle class is much more fragile than it seems. Muljoko earns Jakarta’s minimum wage of Rp2.4m a month, meaning he lives off the equivalent of $7 a day. Roughly half of that goes to pay for food and the small boarding-house room he shares with his younger brother. After covering fuel and maintenance costs for the motorbike, he is left with as little as Rp500,000 ($44) – or less than $1.50 a day – to cover any discretionary spending, send money home to his family in Sumatra, or save for an all-important wedding. It is no wonder Muljoko frets about the future. He worries about what he would do if he were confronted with a family medical emergency and how his earnings would stretch if he were to marry and have a family. By the Asian Development Bank’s standard definition of middle class – earning between $2 and $20 a day – Muljoko is a member in good standing. Yet he feels anything but. ?I don’t feel secure,” he says. In that, the young Indonesian is emblematic of a group increasingly in focus as emerging economies slow. For all the talk of a new middle class, Muljoko is in fact part of what is better described as the world’s fragile middle: the almost 3bn people in the developin