Trade and globalisation have been unfairly blamed for Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, according to a study of incomes that debunks the popular view that a more connected world has led to stagnating fortunes for the lower middle class in rich countries.
The idea that ordinary people have been unfairly hit by the rise of emerging markets and China over the past 30 years and the income gains of the global super-rich was propagated by the so-called “elephant chart” devised by the economist Branko Milanovic, a former senior official at the World Bank.
Development experts celebrated the graph as the “chart that explains the world”. But a new study by the Resolution Foundation, a British charity founded to support the interests of those on low to middle incomes, has overturned its findings.