Watching the middle class

We all know that recent high oil prices have filled government coffers in Moscow and made a few Russians into billionaires. But what about the rest of the population? The FT has a nice analysis of the Russian middle class and its spending habits. In short, the group is starting to spend—and often on Western goods. Western-style retailing and international brands, largely ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

We all know that recent high oil prices have filled government coffers in Moscow and made a few Russians into billionaires. But what about the rest of the population? The FT has a nice analysis of the Russian middle class and its spending habits. In short, the group is starting to spend—and often on Western goods.

We all know that recent high oil prices have filled government coffers in Moscow and made a few Russians into billionaires. But what about the rest of the population? The FT has a nice analysis of the Russian middle class and its spending habits. In short, the group is starting to spend—and often on Western goods.

Western-style retailing and international brands, largely confined a decade ago to metropolitan Moscow and St Petersburg, are spreading to cities across Russia. After the hardships of the 1990s, Russia is finally witnessing the rise of a prosperous post-Soviet middle class.

It’s a phenomenon this year’s Globalization Index noted as well. We appear to be on the cusp of a consumer spending boom in several of the major emerging markets, including China, Brazil, and India. And Western companies are already lining up to provide credit cards to the new global consumers.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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