Briefing and analysis

The Chancellor gave his Budget statement at 12.30 pm on Wednesday 21st March 2007.

On Thursday 22nd March, the day following the Budget, the Institute for Fiscal Studies held a lunchtime briefing.

Presentations from the briefing:

• Introduction, Robert Chote
• The public finances, Christine Frayne
• Public spending, Carl Emmerson
• The distributional impact, Mike Brewer
• Corporation tax, Mike Devereux

Useful publications

Green Budget 2007

The IFS Green Budget 2007 assesses key questions that the Chancellor has to confront in drawing up his 2007 Budget statement. The areas covered are fiscal policy, public spending and the public finances; tax credits; VAT fraud and evasion; taxation of multinationals and the ECJ; and environmental taxation. Published in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, the Green Budget also discusses the outlook for economic growth, funding issues and debt management. 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.

Assuming that this is his last Budget as Chancellor, the likely challenges for Gordon Brown's successor are discussed in a recent article in The Daily Mail.

• Fiscal rules and public spending. A presentation delivered by Gemma Tetlow at IPPR on 7th February 2007.
• The 2007 CSR: A Challenging Spending Review. A presentation delivered by Carl Emmerson at the BMA on 20th February 2007.
• The macroeconomic framework: time for a tweak?. A presentation delivered by Robert Chote at the Strategy Unit on 21st February 2007.

Poverty and inequality

• Estimates of the costs of meeting the Government's child poverty target in 2010/11: update after the Budget 2007. This evidence was submitted to the Treasury Select Committee as part of their Report on the 2007 Budget, 5th report of the session 2006/7, HC 389.
• Micro-simulating child poverty in 2010 and 2020. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report (July 2006) describes how micro-simulation techniques were used to forecast relative child poverty in the UK in 2010 and 2020 under various scenarios for future policy and socio-demographic change.
• The poverty trade-off: work incentives and income redistribution in Britain. A new Joseph Rowntree Foundation report (October 2006) aims to illuminate the trade-off between work incentives and redistribution.

Environmental taxation

The UK tax system and the environment takes a broad overview of the UK environmental tax system as it exists in 2006. It aims to bring together evidence and data from a range of sources to provide a central source of information about the existing environmental tax system, alongside discussion of the key principles of the debate around using taxes and other economic instruments for environmental goals.

Fiscal facts

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 2006) now include changes implemented after the 2006 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 (updated November 2006), describes the government's two fiscal rules and discusses the uncertainty inherent in forecasting the public finances.