Foreign and Military Affairs

Bourgeoisie experience helpful to Chinese middle class

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-03-18 10:45

ROME - Italy's bourgeoisie experience is helpful to the burgeoning Chinese middle class, a sociologist said.

"What the Chinese can learn from us is to correctly balance expenditures and savings because savings are the key to the consolidation of the middle class," said Giuseppe Roma, director-general of leading social-economic think tank Censis.

However, Roma recognized that comparing China to Italy is difficult considering the population. "China has 1.3 billion people and this makes it harder to equally divide the effects of the economic development by spreading general well-being and richness to most of people."

The sociologist stressed that in order to support the consolidation of China's middle class, it's important to inculcate into the Chinese people the value of savings, work and the family.

Roma has visited China many times and said he was impressed by the Chinese people's great innovative and creative capacity, personal initiative and intelligence.

Talking about Italy's middle class, which amounts to almost 80 percent of the entire population, the sociologist noted that it well reacted to the global economic crisis thanks to its high propensity to savings that guaranteed steady consumption levels.

"Italian middle class is very homogenous and stable, among the less indebted in the world." Its rise started 50 years ago after the World War II.

Industrialization and progress spread wealth quickly, leading families to purchase their first property - houses.

"In our country, the family is considered as a sort of joint-stock company that has learned to save money in good times so as to have it at hand in bad ones," he noted.

Italian middle class is divided into two categories: the white collars with a fixed job and salary and the independent professionals including artisans, retailers and entrepreneurs.

The first group has greater job stability but has seen a slow rise in income in the past years due to the effects of globalization. The professionals have enjoyed higher income rises thanks to their dynamism and capacity to innovate.

Roma went on describing the conditions of Italy's middle class: an average monthly salary between 2,000 and 4,000 euros ($2,750 to 5,500), a house (only 12 percent pay a mortgage) per family, with 15 percent owning a second vacation house, two cars and total savings ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 euros ($55,000 to 137,560) for every family.

Roma also lamented a lack in long-term policies for supporting the middle class youth in Italy. "The risk is that the future generations will not have the same quality of life as their fathers, and many stay at home and become economically independent until very late. This could be an obstacle for the progress of Italy's middle class," he said.