Journal article
Income polarisation, expenditure and the Australian urban middle class
I Wiesel, J de Bruyn, J Meekes, S Chandrashekeran
Urban Studies | SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD | Published : 2023
Abstract
Recent years have seen growing concern about the ‘hollowing out’ of the middle class, due to processes of polarisation. In this paper, we examine different conceptualisations of polarisation, and introduce the concept of expenditure-adjusted polarisation that considers not only income, but also various key categories of expenditure at a household level: housing, groceries and meals, transport and energy. Analysing longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, we show that the Australian society is significantly more polarised, with fewer middle-income households, when the relative size of income groups in a given year is based on expenditure-adjusted i..
View full abstractRelated Projects (1)
Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers whose valuable comments substantially improved the quality of the paper. This research received in-kind support from the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (Project ID CE200100025). This paper uses unit record data from Restricted Release 19 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Survey is conducted by the Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research on behalf of the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS). The findings and views reported in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Australian Government, DSS or the Melbourne Institute.