The New York Times recently published an article about the impact of COVID-19 on Africa’s emerging middle class in which World Data Lab (WDL), a partner of NOMIS, has been extensively quoted. WDL has built a global and granular projection model deploying fundamental research on Bayesian Model Averaging to project real-time social and economic changes. Building on this global consumer spending model, our estimates as published in the article indicate that “About 170 million out of Africa’s 1.3 billion people are now classified as middle class. But about eight million of them could be thrust into poverty because of the coronavirus and its economic fallout … The tragedy is that because Africa is not growing fast, this collapse of the middle class could take several years to recover.”
The consumer class is defined as anyone with a disposable income of more than $11 and is based on research published in Nature by Dr. Homi Kharas, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and a co-founder of WDL. The next frontier for WDL is clear: A Health Model estimating mortality in real-time which will also help to understand the long-term life expectancy impacts of COVID-19.