Blanco, Bauluz & Martínez-Toledano (2018): Wealth in Spain, 1900-2014
A century-long reconstruction of Spanish national wealth (1900-2014) finding that land dominated wealth composition throughout — agricultural land early, urban land later — and that housing capital gains drove 45% of real wealth growth from 1950-2010.
Overview
"Wealth in Spain, 1900-2014: A Country of Two Lands" is a 2018 World Inequality Database (WID.world) working paper by Miguel Artola Blanco (Universidad Carlos III), Luis E. Bauluz (Paris School of Economics), and Clara Martínez-Toledano (Paris School of Economics) that reconstructs Spain's national wealth-to-income ratio and its asset composition from 1900 to 2014.[1] The paper finds that Spain's wealth-to-income ratio followed a "J-shaped" path over the century, unlike the U-shaped pattern documented for other rich economies, and that both agricultural land and urban land represented an unusually large share of national wealth — agricultural land in the early twentieth century, urban land in the early twenty-first — relative to other advanced economies.[1] The authors attribute much of this to capital gains: gains from the housing sector alone account for 45% of the real growth of national wealth over 1950-2010.[1] An expanded version covering through 2017 was later published as Artola Blanco, Bauluz & Martínez-Toledano, "Wealth in Spain 1900–2017: A Country of Two Lands," The Economic Journal 131(633), 2021.[2]
The paper extends the land-decomposition literature associated with Matthew Rognlie's reanalysis of Piketty's capital-share data to a national case — Spain — not covered by Rognlie's original US/cross-country study, adding a country where land's share of wealth is unusually pronounced.
See Also
- Most of the modern rise in the capital share is land, not capital — the outcome page this paper's Spanish evidence feeds
- Land is a Big Deal — the book that surfaces this paper's findings (Ch. 6, 17)
- Rognlie, "Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share" — the parallel US/cross-country decomposition this paper extends to Spain
- Bonnet et al., "Land is Back, It Should Be Taxed, It Can Be Taxed" — the equivalent French/European confirmation
Sources
- Miguel Artola Blanco, Luis E. Bauluz & Clara Martínez-Toledano (2018), "Wealth in Spain, 1900-2014: A Country of Two Lands," WID.world Working Paper N° 2018/05 — used for the abstract's core findings: the J-shaped wealth-income ratio, agricultural/urban land's outsized share of national wealth in the early 20th and 21st centuries respectively, and the 45%-of-real-growth-from-housing-capital-gains (1950-2010) figure (directly verified against the paper's abstract and text this session). PDF
- Miguel Artola Blanco, Luis Bauluz & Clara Martínez-Toledano (2021), "Wealth in Spain 1900–2017: A Country of Two Lands," The Economic Journal 131(633), 129–155 — used to confirm the paper's eventual peer-reviewed publication venue and extended time series. Oxford Academic
- Lars A. Doucet (2022), Land is a Big Deal, Shack Simple Press, Ch. 6, 17 — the discovery source citing this paper's Spanish land-wealth findings. Wiki book page
(Doucet's specific chapter-level use of this paper — Land is a Big Deal Ch. 6 and 17 — is taken from the book's citation record and was not independently re-verified against the primary book text this session.)