Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Income distribution, poverty and inequality.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
 | ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy. |
Analysis of the fiscal choices an independent Scotland would face.
Case studies that give a flavour of the areas where IFS research has an impact on society.
Reforming the tax system for the 21st century.
A peer-reviewed quarterly journal publishing articles by academics and practitioners.
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ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Fiscal Policy
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Date started: 01 April 1996
The objective of the ESRC Centre at the IFS is to use the full range of microeconomic and microeconometric techniques on the analysis of fiscal policy in its relationship to households and companies. In achieving this objective, it is essential to have active access to microeconomic databases. In particular, the Centre refines and develops databases and computer models of the personal tax and benefit system and of company taxes, and uses them to develop and test tax reform proposals. The Centre also develops microeconometric techniques to investigate key decisions taken by individuals (such as savings, labour supply and retirement) and companies (such as investment, innovative behaviour and employment), taking full account of the role played by taxes and benefits in those decisions. The development of local finance models has been continued to facilitate a study on the impact of the council tax. The study of consumer spending and saving patterns, and of the ways in which these patterns are affected by indirect taxes, is another important aspect of the work. Research in the Centre is organised and coordinated in four interrelated areas: personal sector corporate sector consumption sector European finance and local public sector.
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The International Monetary Fund has released the conclusions of its annual "Article IV" health-check for the UK economy. It endorses the Government's short-term fiscal giveaway to help ameliorate the recession (which the Conservatives say was a mistake), but says that it should be more ambitious in its plans to repair the public finances once the economic recovery is underway.
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Understanding why the UK has performed relatively poorly in terms of R&D is important for predicting whether current policies can halt this decline and ultimately narrow the productivity gap. This Briefing Note documents and disentangles trends in UK R&D over the period 1981-2000.
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This paper provides an overview of the link between policy and economic growth.
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This paper investigates the economic impact of the government’s proposed new UK R&D tax credit.
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This paper concerns the new economy (alias the knowledge-based economy).
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This paper is an evaluation of the British labor market program the "New Deal for the Young Unemployed" using administrative panel data on individuals between 1982 and 1999.
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The demand for certain types of health care services depends on decisions of both the individual and the health care provider.
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Policy makers in Europe have been concerned that lack of product market competition have led productivity to lag behind the US.
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Election briefing note 5 (2001)
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Election 2001: Business taxes under Labour
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Election 2001: Labour's proposals
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The Conservatives have made several proposals for tax and benefit reform,
including benefit changes, reforms to savings taxation, a cut in fuel duty and a
package of tax cuts for families. This Election Briefing Note analyses how these measures would affect household disposable incomes, how much they
would cost and what the implications for the structure of the tax and benefit system might be.
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This Briefing Note looks at the current government's record on public spending, borrowing and taxation.
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This Election Briefing Note looks at the planned levels of borrowing for the three main parties.
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Election 2001: This Briefing Note looks in detail at public spending.
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This note examines the changes in living standards, inequality and poverty.
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n this paper the assumption of i.i.d. income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the analysis placed on models for the conditional variance of income shocks, that is related to the approporiate measure of risk emphasized by the theory.
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This note examines the evidential basis for claims that UK investment is rising, and the broader picture on investment in the UK in recent years.
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This short paper starts by describing the two fiscal rules and then looks at the latest set of HM Treasury forecasts, which suggest that these rules will indeed be met. We then go on to discuss the level of uncertainty that is implicit in any public finance forecasts.
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This short note outlines some possible scenarios for the path of public
spending beyond March 2004.
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The income transfer systems for low-income families in the US and the UK try both to reduce
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This Election Briefing Note looks at whether we can see a difference between the parties in their approach to taxes and benefits.
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The UK pension system has been subject to almost continuous structural reform since the Social Security Act of 1975 introduced, from 1978, the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS).
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This commentary discusses the rationale for directing financial support to families with children and assesses options for a new integrated child credit.
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This Green Budget looks at the options available to the Chancellor in his March Budget.
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This Election Briefing Note asks which families would gain and which would
lose from Liberal plans for the tax–benefit system, but first it outlines and
analyses the specific measures.
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In this paper we describe the IFS-Leverhulme patents dataset that we have constructed by combining information from the US Case-Western Patent database with UK company accounts and share price information from the London Stock Exchange.
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In a Monte Carlo study of a panel data model it is shown that the corrected variance estimate approximates the final sample variance well, leading to more accurate inference.
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This paper describes all the main benefits in the UK system, giving details of rates and allowances, as well as numbers and types of claimants and levels of expenditure.
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This note looks at how the government might use policy to increase the amount of R&D done in the UK.
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Focusing on the distributional consequences, this paper details the changes in the tax and benefit system in the Labour government's Budgets since they came to power in 1997.
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The government's report, <i>Opportunity for All: Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion</i> (Department of Social Security, 1999), identified poor health as one of the major problems associated with low income.
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The goals of income transfer systems in the US and the UK for low-income families are to
reduce poverty and welfare dependency and encourage work.
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This paper shows that, contrary to common beliefs, the real options effect of uncertainty plays no role in the long run rate of investment.
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In this briefing note, we look at the arguments for and against a fuel tax.
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This paper presents a detailed analysis of the composition of household portfolios, using both aggregate and micro-data.
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Using data from the Family Expenditure Survey we show that the abolition of the earnings rule in the UK increased the number of hours worked by men.
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This chapter reviews developments to improve on the poor performance of the standard GMM estimator for highly autoregressive panel series.
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There is a vast empirical literature of the effects of training on wages that are taken as an indirect measure of productivity. This paper is part of a smaller literature on the effects of training on direct measures of industrial productivity.
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The paper attempts to understand batting strategies that are employed in limited overs cricket games.
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This paper uses a sample of lone mothers (and former lone mothers who are now repartnered) drawn from the 1997 Family Resources Survey to analyse the potential effects of reforming the UK system of child support.
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This paper surveys the issue of public spending on pensions.
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In October 1999, the working families' tax credit (WFTC) replaced family credit as the main package of in-work support for families with children.
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The UK government is planning to introduce stakeholder pensions from April 2001 as an alternative to existing personal pensions for people on moderate earnings.
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This note looks at the kind of information people have on saving and how this effects their decisions to invest in the future. We also ask what policies could be used to provide people with clear information which they trust.
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This paper presents a review of non-experimental methods for the evaluation of social programmes.
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The Green Budget looks at the Chancellor's options for his forthcoming Budget.
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This document provides an overview of the UK tax system, describing how each of the main taxes works and setting their current state in a historical context.
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In this briefing note we add to the current debate on UK annuity markets by providing some simple descriptive analysis from household survey data. In particular, using data from recent waves of the Family Resources Survey, we consider how the current population of (elderly) annuitants differs from the elderly population at large, and describe differences in the characteristics of the group holding voluntary, as opposed to mandatory annuity policies.
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Building on previous work, this paper documents the changes in income inequality that have occurred over the past 20 years, right up until the late 1990s.
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This paper provides an empirical assessment of the overall incentives generated by taxes with respect to the choice between extraction and recycling of basic materials in Canada.
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Since the completion of the Single Market in 1992 it has become easier for people in the UK to take advantage of lower priced goods across the border. Alcohol is one good where there has been particular concern about the level of cross-border shopping because of differences in tax rates between the UK and France. If the Chancellor wants to reduce the amount of cross-border shopping by cutting duty, the important policy question is whether overall these two effects would have a positive or negative effect on revenue.
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This paper analyzes the relationship between aggregate wages and individual
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This paper analyses retirement expectations and outcomes using the two waves of the UK Retirement Survey, undertaken in 1988-89 and 1994.
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This paper make straightforward extensions to Anderson's (1996) nonparametric
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This paper surveys the evidence on the effects of technical change on skills, wages and employment by examining the micro-econometric evidence.
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The briefing was prepared before the 1997 general election.
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This commentary discusses the background to the policy, presents the economic arguments for and against the levy, and examines some of the issues about how the levy might actually operate in practice.
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This paper illustrates recent trends in household consumption and personal savings in the UK and the US and discusses some theoretical models that can be used to interpret them.
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This paper examines the impact of the UK housing benefit system on the financial returns to employment of people in local authority or Housing Association accommodation.
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In this report we describe the charitable giving behaviour of UK households over the last two decades.
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This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.
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This paper describes the evolution of the tax treatment of investment in R&D
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The Green Budget outlines the macroeconomic background, assesses the fiscal stance, and then considers a wide range of tax and spending issues that will be on the Chancellor's pre-budget agenda.
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This paper examines the role of individual and household characteristics in explaining patterns of support for higher public spending on seven of the most important public spending programmes including health, education, the police and defence.
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Labor force participation of men over age 50 fell sharply in the UK between the early 1970s and early 1990s.
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The domestic energy markets in the United Kingdom are still in a process of structural change.
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Since the 1980s, there has been increased interest among unions and two opposition parties in the possibility of introducing a national minimum wage (NMW).
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In Australia, as in most industrialised countries, there has been a dramatic increase in unemployment rates over the last three decades.
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We develop a method which has the main advantage over alternatives of allowing us to combine appealing budget share specifications with a model of quality choice in a way which is fully consistent with demand theory.
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