Briefing and analysis

The Chancellor delivered his Budget statement at 12.30 pm on Wednesday 12th March 2008. Immediate analaysis from IFS is available in this press release.

On Thursday 13th March, the day following the Budget, the Institute for Fiscal Studies held a lunchtime briefing at The Building Centre, near the IFS offices in London.

Presentations can be downloaded here:

• Introduction, Robert Chote
• Impact of Budget 2008 on the public finances, Carl Emmerson
• Meeting the fiscal rules?, Gemma Tetlow
• Direct taxes and benefits, James Browne
• Indirect taxes, Andrew Leicester

Useful publications

Green Budget 2008

The IFS Green Budget 2008 assesses key questions that the Chancellor has to confront in drawing up his 2008 Budget statement. The areas covered are fiscal policy, public spending and the public finances; public sector pay and pensions; capital gains tax and small company taxation; taxation of foreign profits and tax simplification and aviation taxation. Published in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, the Green Budget also discusses the outlook for economic growth, debt management and the credit market. These topics and others were covered in our general election analysis in 2005; we examined Labour's record since 1997 and the proposals in the three largest parties' manifestos.

Public finances

• Since October 2002 IFS has produced monthly bulletins analysing the government's public finance figures.

• On 7 February 2008 IFS produced a press release analysing the effect on the public finances of classifying Northern Rock as part of the public sector.

Poverty and inequality

• Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes This Briefing Note provides an analysis of the characteristics of high-income individuals and how their incomes have evolved over time.

• Pensioner poverty over the next decade: what role for tax and benefit reform? This report looks at the prospects for pensioner poverty in England over the next decade and concludes that recent falls in poverty amongst those aged 65 and over are unlikely to continue after 2007-08, even after the implementation of the proposals outlined in the Government's Pensions White Paper.

• Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2007 This Briefing Note provides an update on trends in living standards, income inequality and poverty.

Income Tax and National Insurance reform

• Integrating Income Tax and National Insurance: an interim report. Income Tax and National Insurance are now sufficiently similar that merging them appears to be a plausible option, yet still sufficiently different that integration raises significant difficulties. This paper surveys the potential benefits of integration and the potential obstacles.

Fiscal facts

A survey of UK local government finance (Briefing Note 74, July 2007) provides an overview of the current system of local government finance in the UK.

Our briefing notes, A survey of the UK tax system (Briefing Note 9, updated January 2007) and A survey of the UK benefit system (Briefing Note 13, updated December 2007) now include changes implemented after the 2007 Budget. Briefing notes include A survey of public spending in the UK (Briefing Note 43, updated September 2004), which provides an overview of public spending in the UK describing components of public spending and examining trends in expenditure.

Another briefing note, The government's fiscal rules (Briefing Note 16, updated November 2006), describes the government's two fiscal rules and discusses the uncertainty inherent in forecasting the public finances.