This full report consists of 11 chapters covering areas including: VAT exemptions and their economic effects; reduced and zero rates and their distributional, welfare and behavioural consequences; administration and compliance costs; VAT fraud; the operation of VAT in a cross-border context; the impact of the EU VAT system on cross-border trade flows; and, the impact of VAT on GDP, consumption and labour markets.

This document contains formal answers to the evaluation questions posed by the Commission.

The Executive Summary contains the main findings of the full report.

Today the Office for National Statistics published its inflation figures for the year to January 2011. We find that although today's figures show that the headline rate of inflation is high, there is relatively little variation in average inflation rates across household types.

The September 2010 inflation numbers, used for the annual inflation adjustments to many taxes, benefits and tax credits, were published today by the ONS. In June, the Chancellor announced that benefits would be uprated with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rather than the Retail Prices Index (RPI) or Rossi Index from April 2011, claiming that the CPI provided a better measure of benefit recipients'

This public economics lecture was delivered at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in October 2009.

Recent increases in the prices of food and fuel have led to higher inflation rates among older and poorer households than among younger and richer ones.

This Commentary looks at the inflation experience (based on the RPI) for different groups of households, focusing in particular on pensioner households.

Recent high inflation has affected pensioner households more severely than non-pensioners according to new research published by IFS.

We present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of-living indices.

This paper tests the published section-level price and weight data used in the compilation of the UK retail price index (RPI) for consistency with the theory of the cost-of-living index.

This paper investigates the patterns and extent of differences in the prices paid for foods, and for the nutrients they contain, amongst households in the UK.

This paper tests the published section level price and weight dataused in the compilation of the UK Retail Prices Index for consistencywith the theory of the cost-of-living index.

The main measure of inflation in the UK is the retail price index (RPI). One way to think of the RPI is as a measure of the changing cost of buying a very large shopping basket containing all of the purchases of a typical UK household. There is, of course, no such thing as a typical household. As a result, inflation varies across the household population, and it would be remarkable if the RPI were a good measure of inflation for every household. This IFS commentary explores the issues surrounding the extent and the implications of differences in inflation rates between households.

We use microeconomic data on households to estimate the parameters of the demand for currency derived from a generalized Baumol-Tobin model.

This report considers sources of bias in cost-of-living and price indices, with particular reference to the UK's retail price index. The sources of bias discussed are caused by the introduction of new goods, quality change in existing goods and commodity substitution by consumers. New methods of quantifying these biases and correcting them are presented with empirical applications.

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound a quality-constant price series for a good that

This paper presents an hedonic model of the price of a sample of new cars available in the UK during the period 1986 to 1995.

The Hicks-Leontief composite commodity theorem permits aggregation of sets of goods that have identical price movements into composite groups of goods, each of which can be treated like a single good for demand analysis.

The only circumstance under which one can speak accurately about <i>the</i> cost-of-living index is one in which household expenditure patterns do not vary.

Measures of average inflation like the RPI cannot, by definition, capture the true cost-of-living increases faced by individual households. This report looks at the extent to which a range of households have had different experiences of inflation over the last 15 years.

The annual exercise of revising excise duties has become part of Budget Day tradition.