Earned and Unearned

Essay · economics · September 2026

National income has two sources: work and ownership. For a century and a half about a quarter to two-fifths of it has gone to those who own, and that share is higher now than fifty years ago. The owners are few: in the United States, the richest tenth holds nearly nine-tenths of all stocks. The returns have beaten growth in almost every decade since 1870, and inheritance is back. Meanwhile the tax on work has risen and the tax on capital has fallen, and Portugal taxes a euro of wages more heavily than a euro of interest.

Reading time ≈ 19 min Engels’ pause → 25 April → IRS 2025 Part II of two

Two incomes

The Estado Novo’s labour charter of 1933 said that “property, capital and labour perform a social function, in a regime of economic cooperation and solidarity”, and then banned strikes and lockouts alike.[1] The first part of this essay, The Duty to Work, followed one half of that settlement: how work became a duty, then an identity, enforced by law and carried by habit. This part follows the other half. The moral language of work praises the person who earns. It is silent about the income that goes to those who own, which is large, concentrated, growing again, and, in most rich countries, taxed more lightly than wages.

Every euro of national income is paid either for work, as wages, salaries and the social contributions attached to them, or for the use of property, as profits, interest, dividends and rents. The self-employed get a mixture, and how it is split is one of several measurement choices that move the answer by several points; so does whether depreciation, the wearing out of machines and buildings, is counted as income, and whether the rent that homeowners implicitly pay themselves is included. Those choices are stated with each figure below. They change the levels. They rarely change the story.

18→24%average net capital share of national income in 18 rich countries, 1971–90 and 2001–18

88%of US stocks and mutual funds held by the richest tenth of households; the poorer half holds 0.6%

16→25%global effective tax rate on labour income, mid-1960s to late 2010s; on capital, 32 fell to 26

45 vs 28per cent of a €50,000 cost taken in tax in Portugal, as a wage and as interest

The long run

A century and a half of the split

The industrial revolution began with a pause in wages. Between 1780 and 1840, output per worker in Britain rose by 46 per cent and the average real wage by 12; between 1800 and 1830 real wages did not grow at all while output per worker grew by 0.6 per cent a year. The economic historian Robert Allen, who calls this “Engels’ pause” after the author of The Condition of the Working Class in England, estimates that the profit share of income more than doubled, from about 20 per cent at the end of the eighteenth century to over 40 per cent by the middle of the nineteenth, while the rate of profit rose from about 10 to over 20 per cent. Only after 1840 did wages catch up.[2] The first decades of the factory age, which were also the decades when working hours rose most and when British workers could be jailed for leaving a job, were a transfer from work to ownership.

Figure 1 picks up the story from 1875 for five countries, with capital’s share measured net of depreciation. The pattern, confirmed across twenty countries, is a wide U. Before the First World War capital took about 28 per cent of national income on average, in Sweden nearly half. The wars, inflation, the Depression, nationalisations, rent controls and the rise of trade unions cut it to an average of 21 per cent in 1946–70 and 18 per cent in 1971–90. It then rose again, to 24 per cent in 2001–18.[3] The rise is clearest in the United States, from about 19 per cent around 1970 to 27 in 2018; in Europe the share rose in the 1980s and 1990s and fell back part of the way after 2000. The same authors find that the capital share and the income share of the top 1 per cent move together in eleven of fifteen countries, most closely since 1980.[3]

Fig. 1 — Capital income (profits, interest, dividends and rents, net of depreciation) as a share of national income, five-year centred averages, 1875–2018. Self-employment income is split between labour and capital by country-specific methods, so levels are less comparable across countries than trends within them. Data: Bengtsson & Waldenström, Historical Factor Shares Database, April 2020 update.

Behind the flow of income is a stock of wealth. Measured as a multiple of a year’s national income, private and public wealth together traced the same U (Figure 2). In France, Germany and Italy it was worth between five and eight years of income before 1914, fell to between one and a half and three after 1945, and is back to between five and a half and seven and a half today. Portugal, where the series starts in 1980, went from about four years of income to seven.[4] A large stock of wealth relative to income means that the past weighs more on the present: more of what a person can have depends on what they own or inherit, and less on what they earn.

Fig. 2 — Market value of national wealth (private plus public, net of debts) divided by national income, 1870–2025; Portugal from 1980. Early values for some countries are reconstructions with low data-quality ratings. Data: World Inequality Database, bulk data file, September 2026.

The last fifty years

Where the labour share went

Figure 3 shows the adjusted wage share, which counts each self-employed person as if paid the average employee wage, from 1960. In most of continental Europe it peaked in the mid-1970s, after a decade of strong unions and wage inflation, fell about ten points by the mid-2000s and has recovered some of it; the EU share has been flat at about 56 per cent since 2000. The United States kept falling, from 61 per cent in 2000 to 54 in 2025, and so did Japan, from 70 in 1980 to 54.[5] The International Labour Organization, which uses a similar adjustment for most of the world’s countries, put the fall in the world’s labour share between 2004 and 2024 at about one and a half points, and made it concrete: output per hour grew 58 per cent over those twenty years and labour income per hour 53, a gap worth $2.4 trillion in 2024 alone.[6]

Fig. 3 — Adjusted wage share: compensation per employee as a share of GDP per person employed, at market prices, 1960–2025 (Japan from 1980, EU from 2000; West Germany before 1991). 2025 values are Commission estimates. Data: European Commission, AMECO database, spring 2026, series ALCD0.

Why it fell is contested, and the contest matters for what can be done about it. One influential estimate finds that labour’s share of corporate output fell by five points worldwide between 1975 and 2012 and that cheaper machines and computers, which firms substituted for workers, explain about half.[7] The IMF reached a similar split for rich countries: about half technology and the exposure of routine jobs to it, the rest globalisation and other factors; and it found that the share going to low- and middle-skilled workers fell by more than seven points between 1995 and 2009 while the high-skilled share rose by five.[7] Others point to market power. In American manufacturing the fall is almost entirely a shift of sales towards “superstar” firms with very low labour shares, not a fall inside ordinary firms; and in the American corporate sector the share going to pure profit, what is left after paying workers and the normal cost of capital, rose by about thirteen points between 1984 and 2014, while the share going to capital in the ordinary sense fell too.[8] That last finding is important for the argument of this essay: what grew was not the reward for saving and investing but a rent.

There are strong counter-arguments about measurement. Nearly all of the long-run rise in the net capital share in the rich countries is housing: the imputed rent of owner-occupied homes and the rents of landlords, much of which accrues to ordinary homeowners.[9] Outside the United States, once dwellings and the self-employed are taken out of the corporate sector, the labour share of business is roughly where it was in 1970.[9] And at the very top, a large part of what the tax authorities record as business income is really the owner’s own labour, the earnings of a consultant or a dentist routed through a company; one estimate puts it at about three-quarters of top pass-through income in the United States.[9] The honest summary is that the fall of the labour share is an American fact more than a European one, that part of the European capital share is the family home, and that the part which is not has become more concentrated and more like a rent.

Portugal

Seventy years in one line

Portugal’s own series, rebuilt from the Banco de Portugal’s long national accounts, runs from 1953 and reads like a political history (Figure 4). Under the Estado Novo, with strikes illegal and wages set by the corporatist system, labour took a steady 63 to 67 per cent of income at factor cost, counting the self-employed as workers. It rose from 1970, as emigration and the colonial wars drained the labour market, and exploded after 25 April 1974: about 90 per cent in 1975, when profits collapsed and a national minimum wage was introduced. Two IMF programmes, in 1977–78 and 1983–85, took it back down to 59 per cent by 1985, through inflation that ran ahead of wages. It recovered to 68 per cent around 2000, fell to 60 after the troika, and is about 66 per cent in 2025.[10] The 1975 peak is overstated by the method, which values every small farmer as a paid employee in a year when profits were near zero; counting employees only, the share went from 53 per cent in 1953 to 73 in 1975 and 48 in 1985, and is 56 today.[10]

Fig. 4 — Portugal: compensation of employees as a share of gross domestic income at factor cost (dashed), and the same adjusted by imputing the average employee compensation to each self-employed worker (solid), 1953–2025. Shaded: IMF programmes of 1977–78 and 1983–85 and the troika programme of 2011–14. The series is spliced to INE national accounts from 1995 and matches AMECO exactly from then; before 1995 it runs three to four points below AMECO’s own back-cast, with the same shape. Data: Banco de Portugal, BPstat, income and employment long series; computation in scripts/work_value.py.

Two things stand out. First, in Portugal the labour share has been set by politics and crises more than by technology: the two largest falls were engineered by stabilisation programmes, and the recent rise is the recovery of what the troika years took, helped by a minimum wage that went from 505 euros in 2014 to 870 in 2025. Employees’ compensation is now 55.6 per cent of factor income, the highest since the current national accounts began in 1995.[11] Second, Portuguese households live almost entirely on work. Property income, the interest, dividends and rents they receive, was 16.8 per cent of their disposable income in 1995, when deposits still paid interest, and 8.1 per cent in 2025, against 13.7 per cent in the EU, 16 in Italy and 18 in Germany.[11] In the country that most believes work is a duty, very few people have any other way to live.

Who owns

Nine-tenths of the shares

Capital income goes to whoever owns the capital, and ownership is far more concentrated than earnings. The American Federal Reserve’s distributional accounts show it most clearly (Figure 5). In mid-2026 the richest 1 per cent of households held 51 per cent of all corporate stocks and mutual funds held directly, the next 9 per cent another 37, and the poorer half 0.6 per cent. Private businesses are held the same way. In 1989 the top tenth held 81 per cent of stocks; now 88.[12] The one asset the middle owns is the house: the middle 40 per cent hold nearly half of all real estate. Pensions are the usual answer to the claim that workers own no capital, and they are more widely spread than shares, but even retirement accounts are top-heavy: the richest tenth holds 56 per cent of their value and the poorer half 5.[12]

Fig. 5 — United States: share of each asset held by households in each wealth group, second quarter of 2026. Stocks and mutual funds exclude those held inside pension plans, which appear under pension entitlements; defined-contribution accounts shown. Data: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Distributional Financial Accounts.

Income follows. In the distributional national accounts for the United States, the top 1 per cent received 26 per cent of all capital income in 1980 and 41 per cent in 2019; the top 10 per cent went from 59 to 68 per cent, and the bottom half from 10 to 7, most of that the imputed return on their homes and pension funds rather than cash.[13] For the top 1 per cent, capital is 62 per cent of their income; for the bottom half, 19.[13]

Portugal is less extreme at the very top and more extreme in the middle. The household wealth survey puts the richest tenth’s share of net wealth at about 50 per cent, close to the euro-area 53; the World Inequality Database, which corrects for the very rich that surveys miss, puts it at 60, with 25 per cent for the top 1.[14] But ownership of financial capital hardly reaches the middle at all. In 2020, 4.7 per cent of Portuguese households held any listed shares and 3.5 per cent any investment funds, against 11 and 13 per cent in the euro area; three-quarters of household financial assets are bank deposits. Seven in ten households own their home, and the home is most of what they own; the richest tenth hold 84 per cent of the value of private businesses and 70 per cent of property other than the main residence.[14]

The return

Money that grows faster than the economy

The central claim of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that when the return on wealth, r, exceeds the growth rate of the economy, g, inherited wealth tends to grow faster than income. The widest test so far, returns on housing, equities, bonds and bills in sixteen countries since 1870, finds a real return on wealth of about 6 per cent a year against growth of about 3. In thirteen of the fifteen decades since the 1870s, the return beat growth; the exceptions were the decade of the First World War and the 1940s, the decades of destruction (Figure 6).[15] For Portugal, where the series is shorter, the average return from 1980 to 2015 was 7.0 per cent a year against growth of 1.9.[15]

Fig. 6 — Average real total return on wealth (a portfolio of housing, equities, bonds and bills weighted by their shares in national wealth) and average real GDP growth, by decade, 1870s to 2010–15, sixteen advanced economies, weighted by real GDP. Data: Jordà, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick & Taylor, “The Rate of Return on Everything”, and the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database, release 6; computation in scripts/work_value.py.

The consequence is that inheritance comes back. In France, where the records are longest, the value of inheritances and gifts passed on each year was 20 to 25 per cent of national income throughout the nineteenth century, fell to about 4 per cent in the 1950s after two wars and a depression, and was back to 14.5 per cent by 2008 (Figure 7).[16] Across France, Britain and Germany, the share of private wealth that was inherited rather than accumulated from one’s own saving fell from about 70 per cent around 1900 to about 40 in 1970, and is back to about 55 per cent.[16] The generation born after the war lived in an unusual world in which work, not birth, was the main route to wealth. Their grandchildren do not.

Fig. 7 — France: the economic flow of bequests and gifts as a share of national income, decennial averages from the 1820s to the 2000s and the single year 2008. Data: Piketty, “On the Long-Run Evolution of Inheritance: France 1820–2050”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 2011, data appendix.

Taxation

Taxed like a duty, taxed like a privilege

If the moral language of the first part were applied to the tax code, earned income would be treated gently and unearned income harshly. The opposite has happened. The most complete reconstruction of effective tax rates, covering 150 countries since 1965, finds that the average tax rate on labour income worldwide rose from 16 per cent in the mid-1960s to 25 per cent in the late 2010s, while the rate on capital income fell from 32 to 26. In the rich countries the two have met at about 30 per cent: labour came up from under 20, capital came down from the high thirties (Figure 8). The effective rate of corporate tax in rich countries fell from 27 to 19 per cent.[17] In Portugal the effective tax rate on labour income rose from about 9 per cent in the late 1960s, when there was hardly a welfare state to finance, to about 31 per cent.[17] The welfare state was built on wages.

Fig. 8 — Effective tax rates on labour and capital income: taxes attributed to each factor (social contributions, payroll taxes and the labour part of personal income tax; corporate, property, wealth and estate taxes and the capital part of personal income tax) divided by each factor’s share of net domestic product, 1965–2018. High-income countries as classified by the World Bank, dollar-weighted. Data: Bachas, Fisher-Post, Jensen & Zucman, globaltaxation.world.

What this means in Portugal can be computed exactly. Take the same amount of a firm’s money, before any tax, and ask how much reaches a person if it is paid as a wage, as interest or as a dividend, under the law for 2025 (Figure 9). Paid as a wage, it bears the employer’s 23.75 per cent social contribution, the employee’s 11 per cent and income tax; of a cost of 20,000 euros, 36 per cent goes in tax, of 50,000, 45 per cent, and of 100,000, 52 per cent. Paid as interest, it bears a flat 28 per cent withheld at source and no social contribution. Paid as a dividend, it first bears corporate tax at 21.5 per cent including the municipal surcharge, then 28 per cent on the dividend: 43.5 per cent in all, more than a wage below about 50,000 euros and less above it.[18] And someone whose only income is Portuguese dividends can choose to have them added to taxable income, of which only half then counts; including the corporate tax already paid, the total take falls to 26 to 31 per cent.[18] The worker on the average wage faces a tax wedge of 39 per cent, above the OECD average of 35, and a marginal wedge on an extra euro of 48 per cent; an extra euro of interest pays 28.[19] Corporate tax, already cut to 20 per cent in 2025, is legislated to fall to 17 per cent by 2028.[18]

Fig. 9 — Portugal, 2025 law: share of the same pre-tax amount taken in tax when paid to a single person without dependants as a wage (employer and employee social contributions plus IRS), as interest (28 per cent liberatory rate), as a dividend from profits (IRC 20 per cent plus 1.5 per cent municipal surcharge, then 28 per cent), and as a dividend aggregated with no other income (IRC and surcharge, then IRS on half the dividend). No deductions, IRS Jovem or special regimes. Computation from CIRS arts. 25, 40-A, 68, 68-A and 71, CIRC art. 87 and the Social Security contributory code, art. 53, in scripts/work_value.py; the wage calculation reproduces the OECD’s figure for the average worker.

The same asymmetry runs through inheritance. Portugal abolished its inheritance and gift tax on 1 January 2004, replacing it with a 10 per cent stamp duty from which spouses, children and parents are exempt; the tax had raised 2.5 per cent of all revenue in 1965.[20] Across the OECD, taxes on inheritances and gifts now raise about half of one per cent of revenue in the countries that levy them.[20] A young Portuguese who earns 50,000 euros a year of labour cost pays about 22,600 of it in tax and contributions. A young Portuguese who inherits a flat worth the same from a parent pays nothing.

A young Portuguese who earns €50,000 of labour cost pays about €22,600 of it in tax. One who inherits a flat worth €50,000 from a parent pays nothing.CIRS 2025; Código do Imposto do Selo, art. 6

The other side

What the owners would say

The case for taxing capital lightly deserves to be stated properly. Capital is mobile and labour much less so: a country that taxes capital heavily may lose investment, and with it the productivity that raises wages; small open economies like Portugal feel that pressure most, which is why the corporate rate is falling. Profits distributed as dividends are taxed twice, once in the firm and once in the hand, and the combined rate of 43.5 per cent is not low. Much interest is a compensation for inflation, and a 28 per cent tax on nominal interest can be a much higher tax on the real return. The returns on wealth include a reward for risk, and a long series of averages hides the investors who lost. Most European capital income is housing, and most houses belong to families who worked for them. And in the United States much of what looks like capital income at the top is labour income in a company’s clothes.[9]

All true, and none of it touches the central asymmetry. The mobility argument explains why capital is taxed lightly; it does not make the outcome fair to those who cannot move. Double taxation of dividends is real, but the options to avoid the second layer, by retaining profits, aggregating dividends at half their value, or taking returns as interest or capital gains, are available only to those who own. Inflation is a problem for savers, but workers are taxed on nominal wages too, and brackets eroded by inflation have raised their taxes in exactly the same way. And inheritance is not a reward for anyone’s risk or effort. The labour share in Europe has held up better than in the United States, and in Portugal it has recovered; but the capital that takes the rest is held by very few, returns more than the economy grows, and passes down the generations taxed at nothing.

Coda

The earner and the owner

The two parts of this essay describe one arrangement. The first found that work was made the centre of life by preaching, law and habit, that the norm is strongest where wages are lowest, and that it serves employers by making people fear the loss of a job more than they fear a bad one. This part found that about a quarter of national income, after depreciation, goes to ownership rather than work, that the share is higher than fifty years ago, that ownership is concentrated far beyond earnings, that its returns have beaten growth for a century and a half, and that the tax systems of the rich world have moved their weight from capital onto work. A society that honours the earner and rewards the owner has a reason to keep telling the earner that work is its own reward.

This matters more, not less, as the machines improve. If artificial intelligence takes over a large part of the tasks now done by salaried people, as the essays on Keynes discussed, the income those tasks produce will go to whoever owns the machines, the data and the firms, unless the rules say otherwise. The question Keynes asked in 1930, what we will do with our time when the economic problem is solved, depends on a question he did not ask: who will own what does the work. The answers are old and unfashionable: tax work and ownership at the same rates, tax large inheritances, and spread ownership itself, the “property-owning democracy” the economist James Meade proposed in 1964.[21] None is a law of nature, and neither is the present arrangement.

Open threads

Where this could go

Portugal before 1953. There is no measured Portuguese labour share for the first half of the twentieth century; growth accounts simply assume a third to capital. The Banco de Portugal’s printed long series and the income tables of the Estado Novo’s own statistics may allow one to be built.

The stamp duty on inheritances. Revenue from the 10 per cent stamp duty on inheritances outside the direct line is not published separately. How much it raises, and how much a modest tax on large direct inheritances would raise, is a calculation worth making with the tax authority’s data.

Who owns Portuguese firms. The survey shows that the richest tenth of households hold 84 per cent of the value of private businesses. Joining that to the national accounts would show how much of the 33 per cent of factor income that is operating surplus reaches Portuguese households, and which ones.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The figures and computed numbers come from scripts/work_value.py, shared with the first part of the essay, reading the Bengtsson-Waldenström factor-share database, the World Inequality Database bulk files, AMECO, the Banco de Portugal’s BPstat long series, Eurostat national and sector accounts, the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database, Piketty’s inheritance series, the Bachas-Fisher-Post-Jensen-Zucman effective tax rates and the OECD’s Taxing Wages and Revenue Statistics. The Portuguese labour share before 1995 is computed from BPstat by imputing the average employee compensation to the self-employed. The Portuguese tax comparison applies the 2025 law to a single person without dependants and no deductions; it reproduces the OECD’s income tax for the average worker to the cent. Results are in docs/work-value-results.json and the figures in docs/work-value-figures.html; the downloaded data and a note giving the source, table and page of every number are kept with the script’s data.

The cover photograph shows the Pátio das Nações of the Palácio da Bolsa, the nineteenth-century seat of Porto’s commercial association, with the arms of the countries it traded with; photograph by Onizuka2222, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. The Duty to Work (forthcoming) — Part I: how work became a duty, an identity and a source of status, and what it does to happiness.
2. Where the Hours Went — the productivity-pay gap, the labour share in the US and who got the income.
3. The Two-Thirds Country — Portugal’s productivity, wages and wage share since 1960.
4. The Fifteen-Hour Week — Keynes’s prediction and artificial intelligence.
5. O Grande Debate — the argument over markets, states and who gets the output.

Sources

1. Decreto-Lei n.º 23 048, de 23 de Setembro de 1933 (Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional), arts. 11 and 21–23; Constituição Política de 1933, arts. 35 and 39.
2. Robert C. Allen, “Engels’ pause: Technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the British industrial revolution”, Explorations in Economic History 46, 418 (2009), pp. 419–421 and Table 1.
3. Bengtsson & Waldenström, “Capital Shares and Income Inequality: Evidence from the Long Run”, Journal of Economic History 78, 712 (2018); Historical Factor Shares Database, 1875–2018, April 2020; era averages computed in scripts/work_value.py (unbalanced panel of 13 to 18 countries).
4. World Inequality Database, national and private wealth-to-income ratios (wnweali999), bulk download September 2026; Piketty & Zucman, “Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 1255 (2014).
5. European Commission, AMECO database, spring 2026: adjusted wage share, total economy, % of GDP at market prices (ALCD0).
6. International Labour Organization, World Employment and Social Outlook: September 2024 Update, pp. 1–3; ILOSTAT, labour income share as a percent of GDP (SDG 10.4.1), modelled estimates, November 2025.
7. Karabarbounis & Neiman, “The Global Decline of the Labor Share”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 61 (2014); International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, April 2017, ch. 3, pp. 121–126.
8. Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson & Van Reenen, “The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, 645 (2020); Barkai, “Declining Labor and Capital Shares”, Journal of Finance 75, 2421 (2020), pp. 2423–2424.
9. Rognlie, “Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2015, pp. 1–14; Gutiérrez & Piton, “Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-Housing) Labor Share”, American Economic Review: Insights 2, 321 (2020); Smith, Yagan, Zidar & Zwick, “Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, 1675 (2019).
10. Banco de Portugal, BPstat: income and saving (compensation of employees; corporate and property income; taxes on production) and employment (total employment; employees), 1953–2025, from Séries Longas para a Economia Portuguesa – pós II Guerra Mundial (1997, revised 1999) and INE national accounts; adjusted share computed in scripts/work_value.py.
11. Eurostat, national accounts (nama_10_gdp) and non-financial sector accounts (nasa_10_nf_tr), households and NPISH: compensation of employees, gross operating surplus, mixed income and property income received, 1995–2025; retribuição mínima mensal garantida, 2014 and 2025.
12. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Distributional Financial Accounts, levels by net-worth percentile group, 1989:Q3–2026:Q2.
13. World Inequality Database, United States distributional national accounts: factor capital and labour income by pre-tax income group (sfkincj992, sflincj992), 1962–2019; Piketty, Saez & Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, 553 (2018).
14. European Central Bank, The Household Finance and Consumption Survey: Wave 2021 Statistical Tables, July 2023, Tables A1, B1, C1 and J4; INE and Banco de Portugal, Inquérito à Situação Financeira das Famílias 2024, press release of 28 May 2026; World Inequality Database, net personal wealth shares, Portugal, 2024.
15. Jordà, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick & Taylor, “The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, 1225 (2019); Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database, release 6; decade averages computed in scripts/work_value.py.
16. Piketty, “On the Long-Run Evolution of Inheritance: France 1820–2050”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, 1071 (2011), data appendix; Alvaredo, Garbinti & Piketty, “On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010”, Economica 84, 239 (2017), abstract and appendix (simplified definition).
17. Bachas, Fisher-Post, Jensen & Zucman, “Capital Taxation, Development, and Globalization: Evidence from a Macro-Historical Database”, May 2024 (previously NBER working paper 29819, “Globalization and Factor Income Taxation”), section 4.1, pp. 12–13; data from globaltaxation.world.
18. Código do IRS, arts. 25, 40-A, 68 (as set by Lei n.º 55-A/2025, de 22 de Julho), 68-A, 71 and 72; Código do IRC, art. 87, as amended by Lei n.º 64/2025, de 7 de Novembro; Lei n.º 73/2013, art. 18 (municipal surcharge); Código dos Regimes Contributivos (Lei n.º 110/2009), art. 53.
19. OECD, Taxing Wages 2026, Portugal country note and data (single worker at the average wage, 2025).
20. Decreto-Lei n.º 287/2003, de 12 de Novembro, arts. 31–32; Código do Imposto do Selo, art. 6, al. e), and Tabela Geral, verba 1.2; OECD, Inheritance Taxation in OECD Countries, Tax Policy Studies 28, 2021, p. 3 and pp. 75 and 132–133; OECD Revenue Statistics, tax 4300, Portugal 1965.
21. J. E. Meade, Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property, Allen & Unwin, 1964.