Word.ws English Dictionary

middle-income trap

middle-income trap is the alternative form of middle income trap.

Meaning of middle income trap

Noun

middle income trap (plural middle income traps)

  1. The situation where a country that attains a certain income gets stuck at that level, being unable to compete with other more developed economies in the high-value-added market.
    • Thailand and Malaysia are hemmed in by the so-called "middle-income trap", which suggests that while countries can move up from the ranks of the very poor, moving further forward is more complex, as competitiveness falls off and costs for investors increase.2010 December 23, Simon Roughneen, “Vietnam: a development success story?”, in The Guardian

Forms of middle-income trap

pluralmiddle-income traps

Questions about middle-income trap

What is middle-income trap the alternative form of?
Middle-income trap is the alternative form of middle income trap.

Words near middle-income trap in the dictionary

  1. middle-fingers
  2. middle-ground
  3. middle-grounder
  4. middle-grounders
  5. middle-grounds
  6. middle-income trap
  7. Middle-Indo-Aryan
  8. middle-man
  9. middle-market
  10. middle-men
  11. middle-nameless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: middle-income trap (page history and authors); middle income trap (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “middle-income trap.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/middle-income_trap. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.