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Per Capita Sample Household: Primary earner: $42,500 Secondary earner: $28,000 Dependent 1: no earnings Dependent 2: no earnings

Global Stratification High-Income Countries Global stratification is the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and resources among the countries of the world. Experts classify nations first and foremost according to income, using categories such as “high-income,” “upper-middle income,” “lower-middle income,” and “lower income.” High-income nations are modern, urban, and industrialized, with modernized cities and well- developed science and technology. With industrialization, society changes as a working class of laborers develops along with a middle class of business owners, creating a need for greater literacy and formal education in areas such as science. Compared to agrarian societies, industrialized societies have a lower level of social inequality despite frequent extremes of wealth and poverty.

Global Stratification Middle-Income Countries Slightly more than half of the countries in the world (51 percent) are middle income, a level divided into upper-middle income countries and lower-middle income countries. The income and living standards of middle-income countries varies greatly, particularly since, as more nations are elevated from low-income to middle- income status, middle-income countries are seeing a larger share of the world’s poor. It is exceedingly difficult to talk about the average standard of living in middle-income countries since large wealth gaps in these countries mean that millions of the poor have become part of the middle-income group of nations.

Global Stratification Low-Income Countries When measuring poverty, experts turn to other indicators, or gauges, the most useful of which are human-development indicators. These indicators relate to the quality of life, such as infant mortality rate, percentage of children underweight, life expectancy, access to contraception, literacy, gender equality, public dollars spent on health per person, and access to clean drinking water. Structural functionalists maintain that some countries are poverty-stricken because they failed to modernize, sometimes because values of traditional societies prevent the nations from developing economically. Other sociologists suggest that many poor nations are poor because they are economically dominated by industrialized countries. Critics of globalization argue that the economic power of multinational corporations and global markets begins to eclipse the ability of poor countries to manage their economies.

Chronic Poverty Map Click here to view map

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