by Silvia Marchetti, Wang Yunjia
ROME, March 17 (Xinhua) -- Italy's bourgeoisie experience is helpful to the burgeoning Chinese middle class, a sociologist said.
"What the Chinese can learn from us is to correctly balance expenditures and savings because savings are the key to the consolidation of the middle class," said Giuseppe Roma, director-general of leading social-economic think tank Censis.
However, Roma recognized that comparing China to Italy is difficult considering the population. "China has 1.3 billion people and this makes it harder to equally divide the effects of the economic development by spreading general well-being and richness to most of people."
The sociologist stressed that in order to support the consolidation of China's middle class, it's important to inculcate into the Chinese people the value of savings, work and the family.
Roma has visited China many times and said he was impressed by the Chinese people's great innovative and creative capacity, personal initiative and intelligence.
Talking about Italy's middle class, which amounts to almost 80 percent of the entire population, the sociologist noted that it well reacted to the global economic crisis thanks to its high propensity to savings that guaranteed steady consumption levels.
