The report said that economic conditions are “strongly” transmitted from generation to generation in Portugal.
Taking into account the mobility of income from one generation to another and the level of wage inequality in Portugal, it can take five generations for a family at the bottom of the income distribution to attain an average wage, the report said.
The OECD data showed that 33 percent of the people in Portugal agree that the parents’ education is important for success in life, slightly lower than the OECD average of 37 percent, while many are very pessimistic about the chances of their financial situation improving.
The organisation also said that it conducted a survey this year and found that 58 percent of Portuguese parents put the risk of their children not attaining their own level of comfort and financial level in their top three concerns.
This compares with the British proverb of ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’, meaning that family wealth rarely lasts through the third generation, Many other languages have similar ideas.