Our analysis of the Chancellor's Autumn Statement will be delivered at a briefing on Thursday 24 November. Presentations from the briefing will be posted online. A recent briefing note looks at the public finance challenge faced by Mr Hammond.
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A special issue of Fiscal Studies published today looks at patterns of individual level health spending across a range of countries, and finds some important similarities. It shows how health spending is concentrated in the last years of life, how significantly more is spent on the poor than on the rich and how health spending tends to be concentrated on a relatively small number of people with high needs.
Find out moreAutomatic enrolment – where employers have to enrol employees into a workplace pension scheme, which employees can then choose to leave – increased pension saving by £2.5 billion per year by April 2015. This is one of the main findings of new research, published today by the IFS and funded by the IFS retirement saving consortium. The research exploits data on almost half a million jobs from April 2011 to April 2015 to look at how contributions to workplace pensions by private sector employers and their employees have been affected by automatic enrolment.
Find out moreThere have been twelve fiscal rules since 1997, ten of which have been broken or abandoned. Writing in The Times, IFS Director Paul Johnson says the Chancellor should allow some flexibility to adjust plans and borrow for investment as the world changes.
Find out moreThis morning the Office for National Statistics announced that CPI inflation rose to 0.9% in the year to October, down from an inflation rate of 1.0% in the year to September but still substantially up from 0.6% in the year to August. The Bank of England expect inflation to rise further, to 2.4% in 2017 and 2.8% in 2018 – considerably higher than the 1.5% and 2.1% expected back in May. Most of this forecast increase is driven by the recent devaluation of the pound, which pushes up the price of imports. In this Observation we look at how the overall 2.5% increase in the price level which is likely to result from sterling’s decline since the June referendum will affect the prices of different goods. We then look at whether this is likely to have a bigger effect on poorer or richer households.
Find out moreIn this Autumn Statement lower growth forecasts will push up forecast government borrowing and debt, new IFS analysis shows. By 2019–20 our central estimate is that, with no policy change, lower growth could result in tax revenues being £31 billion lower than forecast in the Budget. This might be offset by £6 billion lower spending if we stop any payments to the EU budget. The net effect of borrowing £25 billion more than forecast in the Budget, would imply a deficit of £14.9 billion rather than the £10.4 billion surplus that George Osborne was aiming for.
Find out moreA lower cap on the total amount of benefits that households can receive has come into force, affecting four times as many households as the previous benefit cap. Like the previous cap it applies to out-of-work households of working age (with some exemptions, mainly due to disability). The cap is now £23,000 a year in London and £20,000 elsewhere (there are lower caps for single adults without children set at £15,410 in London and £13,400 elsewhere). This compares to £26,000 nationwide under the previous cap, which has been in place since 2013. We look at the implications of a lower cap for government spending, the impact on the households affected, and how they might respond.
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