Middle-Income Countries (MICs)

Middle-income countries (MICs) have some of the comforts of the highest income countries, but with the room to grow of lower-income countries. Since inflation is a thing, they (the people over at the World Bank) have to update the nominal dollar amount that determines what countries count as “middle income” every once in a while.

For now, their gross national income (GNI) per capita needs to be in the range of $1,005 and $12,235. Yep...MICs are determined per capita, not just overall GNI. The World Bank classifies all countries as falling low, middle, and upper income, but also more specifically with lower-middle and upper-middle...both within the MICs’ GNI dollar amounts...when that seems more appropriate.

They used to call lower and middle income countries “developing” until 2016, but then they decided “eh, what does that mean anyway…?” and came up with some new, more relative categories. MICs are a bfd, since the group includes China and India, which combined are about a third of all humanity.