Human Capital and the Middle Class in the XXI Century: Characteristics and Role in Achieving Economic Steadiness, Social Security and Political Stability

The article is devoted to the crucial problems of the middle class formation and to the clarification of its role in the XXI century. In the course of the research the authors analyzed the functions of the middle class and the regularities of its formation. The article considers the importance of progressive changes in the society social structure based on the creation of conditions for the application of knowledge, skills and competences of the working population in the form of profitable economic assets, i.e. human capital. The main goal of the study is to prove the crucial role of the formation of a powerful middle class, and hence the progressive transformation of the society social structure, which is a prerequisite for economic steadiness, political stability and social security. The negative course of the relevant processes in developing countries has determined the relevance of the chosen topic. The generalization of theoretical sources and the analysis of the existing methodological tools made it possible to distinguish two main approaches to the fact of the middle class existence with its inherent stabilizing functions: monetary and sociological. This helped to define the main hypothesis of the study: only the presence of positive conclusions, both in terms of monetary and sociological approach, will allow us to report about the formation of the middle class as a driving force of socio-economic development. The novelty of the study is obtaining and interpretation of fundamentally new data on differences in the assessments of the middle class segment on monetary and sociological approaches in Ukraine, as a country seeking integration into the community of the European Union. This contributed to the formation of recommendations aimed at establishment of the middle class powerful core in Ukraine and other countries that are developing and seeking to achieve standards of economic steadiness, political stability and social security.