Measurement of middle class is not an easy task due to several reasons. Firstly, it impose the elaboration of a classification of population into social classes, for which it is necessary to take into consideration some objective criteria, as level of incomes, occupation or level of education, skills or others, but also subjective criteria as the prestige of the profession or company, manual or non-manual character of work, social category of family or residential area where person was born. Bigger the number of criteria taken into account is, bigger the subjectivity of the classification is. Another difficult issue is related to the availability of data sources allowing the estimation of middle class. Ordinary data sources, namely the sample surveys, use major classifications' classes, which make less detailed the analysis. This article proposes to present a first perspective, strictly quantitative, regarding the measurement of middle class in Romania, through the indicator of population's incomes. The authors use two approaches in order to estimate middle class: an absolute one and a relative one. In the relative approach, the middle class is defines as the category of persons which represents one third from the total population, that third which carry-out the median part of the income distribution. On the contrary, in the absolute approach, the middle class contains the persons which have the incomes included in the second interval of the income distribution. For each of those two approaches, the article presents the main characteristics of the persons defined as middle class.. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.
