CSB Working Paper, 2018, 10: Belgium, a poster child for inclusive growth?

Belgium's middle income households have enjoyed rising real living standards in an almost uninterrupted way for as long as household income data goes back, which is some thirty years. Even the recent economic crisis did little to slow the unglamorous but steady rises households experienced up to that point, making Belgium something of an exception in the rich world.

Belgium's atypical and fascinating trajectory extends far beyond the crisis period, as this chapter will bring out. Belgium stands …

Belgium's middle income households have enjoyed rising real living standards in an almost uninterrupted way for as long as household income data goes back, which is some thirty years. Even the recent economic crisis did little to slow the unglamorous but steady rises households experienced up to that point, making Belgium something of an exception in the rich world.

Belgium's atypical and fascinating trajectory extends far beyond the crisis period, as this chapter will bring out. Belgium stands out in that there has been less of a divergence than in many places elsewhere between the conventional measures of economic affluence, like GDP per capita, and actual household living standards as recorded through surveys and other microdata. In other words, the benefits to economic growth appear to have been more equitably spread than in many other rich economies, where the rich have tended to gain disproportionately.

In what follows we start by looking at middle income living standards in some detail, decomposing these to gauge the relative importance of employment and earnings trends as well as welfare state benefits. Subsequent sections add further context to these numbers. In the next-to-final section we ask whether Belgium offers a model, if only in parts, for inclusive growth that might deserve emulation elsewhere. We also question whether the income based measures of well-being on which we mostly concentrate in this chapter capture the whole middle-class experience. The final section considers the prospects for Belgium's middle class.