Owning a home does not yield cash income but has the equivalent effect in that it saves the owner from having to pay rent. For this reason, the application of the comprehensive definition of income indicates that we should impute an income, referred to as "imputed rent."

In the case of globalisation, what lies behind is the standard international trade model (usually referred to as the Heckscher–Ohlin model after the two Swedish economists Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin), according to which the classes of workers, skilled and unskilled, are employed in two perfectly competitive economies, each with two sectors of production.

Such a bias arises in an acute form in what is known as the Baumol effect, after the US economist William J. Baumol, who argued that productivity grows faster in certain sectors than in others, and that in some sectors there was no scope for producing more output per person.

the "parlous state" of German unions

If families practice primogeniture, passing wealth on each time to a single member of the next generation (typically the oldest son), then the total would be unaffected.

the “Laffer curve” is not a new concept, but it is much cited today. The key point is that globalisation and technological change have together shifted the curve downward, so that for any tax rate the government collects less revenue.