Hillbilly said:
Middle class here might be considered anyone with a steady job.
HB
It's more complicated than that!
But, for the sake of simplicity:
The poverty line is RD$ 894 per capita per month or US$ 60. Anyone making this amount or less per month is poor. The only people under such incomes are those living in extreme poverty, this means that poverty in this country is only considered such by the government when its extreme poverty only.
21.5% (or 412,599) of all households in the country fall under the poverty line.
25.8% (or 2.1 million) of the population (this includes every man, woman, and child- with children making the majority of this figure) fall under the poverty line.
These figures came from the central bank.
The upper class composes around 10% of the population of the country, according to official data. Roughly, half of these are new money based in Santo Domingo and the other half is composed of new money and old living in the rest of the country, with Santiago being a major nucleus outside SD.
This leaves approximately 64.2% of the population. One would think that these remaining 64.2% of the population would be middle class and in fact, they are counted as middle class by the government, however there is a marked distinction to be made and is sometimes left out of the details.
Roughly, 45% of those in the middle class (or 29.2% of the total population) are in reality lower class Dominicans. However, they receive remittance checks from family members living abroad which increases their incomes to those of the real middle class. Sometimes they live in cinderblock homes built by their absentee family members and other times they continue to live in wooden homes, but they are considered middle class due to the "subsidy" their family abroad supplies them with, usually on a monthly basis.
When ever you see figures claiming poverty in the DR being 25% of population or 55%, usually the latter includes lower class Dominicans receiving remittances as poor in addition to the real poor whereas that is not the case in the first case. This distinction is important for all people looking into statistics of this country, either Dominican or foreign made.
The real Dominican middle class only consist of 35% and almost all of them are professionals and/or have a degree of some sort in some specialized field. These are also known as the upper middle class.
It's important to note that illegal Haitian immigrants and those here on temporary permits are excluded from official data and thus, will not surface into official figure. If we were to include these immigrants who are mostly illegal into the figures, the percentage of poor people in official data would increase.
-NAL