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Uruguay SOCIAL CLASSES
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Plowing in Los Arenales, Canelones Department
Courtesy Inter-American Development Bank
By Latin American standards, Uruguay is a relatively
egalitarian society with a large middle class. One factor
that
historically helped the country avoid social polarization
was the
broad provision of free public education by the state
starting in
the 1870s. Economic stagnation since the 1950s has reduced
the
opportunities for upward social mobility, but the
incidence of
extreme wealth and poverty still approximated the pattern
of
developed countries rather than that of the Third World.
Uruguay's upper classes consisted of ranchers,
businessmen,
and politicians. The middle classes include professionals,
whitecollar workers, small businessmen, and medium-sized
farmers. The
lower classes consisted of blue-collar workers, domestic
workers,
a small number of peasants, and those forced to survive
precariously in the informal sector of the economy.
Estimates of the proportion of different sectors of the
population in each class are by definition arbitrary. The
upper
classes are conventionally held to constitute 5 percent of
the
citizenry, but the relative sizes of the middle and lower
classes
have been much debated. In the 1950s, mainstream
sociologists
estimated that the middle classes constituted as much as
twothirds of the population. More radical writers in the
1960s
suggested a figure as low as one-third. A reasonable
figure,
however, would be 45 percent, a proportion broadly
consistent
with the occupational structure revealed by census data.
This
left half the population in the lower-class category,
although it
must be stressed that class differences in Uruguay were
far less
pronounced than in much of Latin America.
Data as of December 1990
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