Which countries have escaped the middle-income trap?

Over thegdpgdp past half-century, many promising economies have become ensnared in middle-income mediocrity. To help its biggest client avoid this fate, the World Bank published a flagship report ten years ago entitled “China 2030”. The publication warned of the “middle-income trap”, a term to describe the phenomenon. “Of 101 middle-income economies in 1960, only 13 became high-income by 2008,” it claimed. This striking statistic was illustrated with a chart similar to the one below. A decade later, how has the picture changed?Answering the question depends on the definition of middle-income employed. According to the World Bank’s official classifications, a country becomes high-income only when its per person exceeds around $13,200. By that standard, China looks set to escape the middle-income trap in a year or two. But for the purposes of the “China 2030” chart, the bank adopted a more stringent definition: middle-income countries have a per person, at purchasing-power parity, of between roughly 5% and 43% of America’s.