MIFFs: Middle Income, Fragile or Failing states

Andy Summer on MIFFs:

What do Pakistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Sudan and perhaps Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have in common? Fragility and middle-income status.

Picked up by The Economist:

Yet strikingly, some 15 of the 56 countries on the bank’s lower-middle income list (ie, over a quarter) also appear on the list of fragile and failed states maintained by the OECD, a rich-country club.

*Two Trends in Global Poverty, by Geoffrey Gertz and Laurence Chandy. Brookings Institution, 2011 **Conflict, Security and Development, The World Bank.