The Canadian middle class have been found to be now the world's richest in that segment, a report on incomes published on Tuesday in the New York Times said.

The report, which looked at the incomes of middle class earners in about 20 nations, likewise said Canadians have bumped Americans from the top spot which the latter had long held.

"Middle-class incomes in Canada - substantially behind in 2000 - now appear to be higher than in the United States," the report said.

"Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then," it added.

Douglas Porter, chief economist and managing director for BMO Nesbitt Burns, said the report basically revealed much about the present U.S. economy.

"It says as much about how badly damaged the U.S. economy was during the recession as it is necessarily a positive mark for Canada," Porter told CTV News.

The report said most American workers were left receiving meagre raises because the total bounty produced by the American economy has not been growing substantially faster here in recent decades than in Canada or Western Europe.

"Finally, governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income."

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist of CIBC World Markets, said the widening income gap in the United States speaks more for itself.

"In my opinion, the widening income gap in the U.S. is the number one economic problem facing the U.S."

"It is not that we are doing great (we are not), it is that the U.S. is doing much worse," Tal said.