Carl is Deputy Director of the IFS, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an editor of the annual IFS Green Budget and a Director of the Pensions Review. His research includes issues around the UK's public finances, and household retirement saving decisions.
He is also a member of the Social Security Advisory Committee, the advisory panel of the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the UK Statistics Authority's Methodological Assurance Review Panel. He previously served as a specialist advisor to the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee.
Education
MSc Economics, Birkbeck, University of London, 1999
BSc (1st Class) Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1996
If the pattern observed in the first ten months of the financial year continues for the next two, government borrowing will be £44 billion this year. This would be £3.5 billion lower than implied by the OBR’s restated March 2019 forecast. But it is worth recalling that just four years ago, in March 2016, a surplus of £10.4 billion was forecast for this financial year: i.e. we have seen a deterioration of around £55 billion in four years.
Labour’s 2019 general election manifesto pledged to “bring rail, mail, water and energy” alongside “the broadband-relevant parts of BT” into public ownership. In this report we set out the scale of this proposed programme of nationalisation and some of the key issues it would raise.
Here we outline an initial response from IFS researchers on the Conservative party manifesto. We take policy areas by turn but this is not a full assessment.
This briefing note describes the state pension age increases that have been legislated by various governments in recent decades, and discusses how they relate to improvements in life expectancies and how spending on state pensions is projected to evolve as a result.
The Chancellor and Shadow Chancellor have both outlined the fiscal targets that they would seek to adhere to. Mr Javid has chosen to adopt a forward-looking rolling target aimed at current budget balance. In other words, day-to-day spending could not exceed total revenues. This is very similar in nature to Mr McDonnell’s longstanding current budget target.
Whether the UK leaves the European Union, and if so on what terms, is a crucial issue andtherefore rightly should be the subject of much debate in the run-up to the generalelection on 12 December.
Had Sajid Javid’s first Budget taken place as planned today he would have unveiled new forecasts showing that following considerable falls in borrowing over the current decade the era of deficit reduction is now at an end. Forecasts for borrowing next year would likely have been at least £30 billion higher than those made by the OBR back in March. We will get some new updates from the OBR tomorrow, but only to take account of statistical and accounting changes since the Spring. Here we provide a more fully updated set of fiscal forecasts which also take account of policy changes over the past nine months. The current political bidding war would lead us to believe that actual outturns for the deficit are likely to be significantly higher again.
Post-financial-crisis, public sector borrowing – the gap between government revenue and spending – has fallen and, at the March 2019 Spring Statement, it stood below its long-run historical average. However, a number of changes have occurred since March, or loom on the horizon.
The fiscal targets bequeathed by former chancellor Philip Hammond all expire during the current forecast period. Moreover, the government has stated that it wants to keep open the possibility of a ‘no deal’ Brexit and, should this occur, it would require an important decision on how fiscal policy should adjust both in the near and long term. These two issues interact since any new fiscal targets ought to be carefully designed so that they are robust to plausible scenarios for the UK economy, not least around Brexit.
The IFS Green Budget 2019, in association with Citi and the Nuffield Foundation, is edited by Carl Emmerson, Christine Farquharson and Paul Johnson, and copy-edited by Judith Payne. The report looks at the issues and challenges facing Chancellor Sajid Javid as he prepares for his first Budget.
We examine the effect of obliging employers to enrol employees automatically into a workplace pension scheme. We exploit the phased roll-out of automatic enrolment, by employer size, in the first country to do so nationwide (the UK), to estimate its effect on pension saving among private sector employees.
The British economy is going to face a number of big issues over the next fifty years. Whether it is reforming the tax and benefit system, managing an ageing population, or preparing for the workplace of the future, there are plenty of challenges and opportunities ahead.
Event
25 June 2019 at 19:3021 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS
In the context of demographic change, among other trends, how will the incomes of pensioners in the future be supported? This IFS at 50 event will look at how our pensions and savings system has worked to support retirement incomes and how we should think about supporting future generations of pensioners in the decades to come.
