To contribute to the government's thinking in the run-up to the Budget the IFS today publishes new research assessing the operation of the Government's Code for Fiscal Stability since its introduction in 1998.

This papers lays out how improvements could be made to the government's fiscal code in the light of recent experiences.

In this note, the authors examine how we might measure the fiscal stance in terms of the scale of the public deficit. They show the path the gap between state income and expenditure has taken since 1946. The paper also tries to isolate the effects of government policy as opposed to the economic cycle.

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.