Declarations of succession were recorded in Belgium since 1795. From this date onwards successions of real estate in Belgium became subject to systematic registration and taxation, which was extended to include movable property in 1799. Every inheritance had to be recorded in a declaration of succession, deposited by the inheritors in the local office of registration after the death of the legator. This source offers a continuous series of records detailing the composition, division, and nature of wealth holdings of households in Belgium and forms an essential base for the data collection of this project.
(Tabulated) returns on exceptional capital taxes can be used to provide complementary data on the evolution of wealth holdings. War contributions on capital were levied in 1794, 1796, 1917, and 1945. Census data from 1796 and 1900 will also be mobilised to provide the contextual information needed to construct the weighted samples and estate multipliers for the data collection of the declarations of succession.
Belgian Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) is a relatively new dataset that covers household wealth, income, and consumption information as well as socio-demographic characteristics of households. To date three waves have been released and the field work of the fourth wave has been concluded in 2021. For more info in this source, click here.
The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data that is relevant for studying the effects of health, social, economic and environmental policies over the life-course of European citizens and beyond. From 2005 until today, in-depth interviews with people aged 50 or older in Belgium have been conducted every two years. Click this link to find out more about this source.
The Socio-Economic Panel (SEP), organised by the Centre for Social Policy Herman Deleeck, is a representative sample of Belgian households and includes 4 waves (1985, 1988, 1992 and 1997). It contains detailed information on socio-economic characteristics of the households, as well as a set of variables on net wealth and its components. For more info, see website.
Proceedings of the plenary sessions of the Belgian parliament have been fully digitised for the period 1870-1940 by the University of Antwerp. The plenary sessions comprise an immense amount of text: in most years, at least 2000 pages of Parliamentary speeches and debates were published. For the first phase of our project, which only covers the period 1870-1940, the corpus totals over 137.000 pages, or 183 million words.
The collections of digitised newspapers and magazines has been made available by the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) through BelgicaPress and BelgicaPeriodicals. For some ten years now, KBR has been digitising its collections. Priority is given to vulnerable collections. More than 3,5 million newspaper pages have been digitised since 2006. By means of partnerships, a total of more than 4 million digitised documents have been produced.