This notebook looks at the “missing middle” – i.e. the segment of the population that is missing from government datasets because it’s members don’t receive social protection or participate in the formal economy. I first look at the size of the missing middle across countries, then I test whether it is really in the middle.

1 Size of missing middle

The figures below show the proportion of adults receiving transfers, the proportion receiving wages or pensions, and the proportion receiving none of these by income. These figures differ from the earlier ones in that a) I include all countries for which we have raw Findex data and b) I take into account the overlap between the groups. (The latter isn’t possibly when using country level data.)

The high-level takeaways are largely the same – the size of the “missing middle” is highly correlated with income.