 Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
Find out where you are in the income distribution.
ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy.
Reforming the tax system for the 21st century.
A peer-reviewed quarterly journal publishing articles by academics and practitioners.
Resources for schools and students.
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Since its foundation in the 1960s, the IFS has been studying developments in the UK's tax and social security system. This continues to be a core part of the Institute's work, making a particularly important contribution to public debate around the government's annual set pieces of the Budget and Pre-Budget Report, and the Institute's own Green Budget. Research at the IFS concentrates on describing and analysing changes and proposed changes to the tax and social security system, and in using large cross-sectional household datasets to model the impact of reforms on individuals' incomes and behaviour. Below, we present specific projects that researchers at the IFS have worked on in recent years, although the constant need to maintain the Institute's tax and benefit model means that IFS researchers are familiar with almost all areas of personal tax and social security in the UK.
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Robert Chote, Director of IFS, delivered these opening remarks at the IFS 2010 Election Briefing on 27 April 2010.
This note discusses the tax and benefit proposals of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, looking at their economic and administrative merits, their distributional impact and their effect of incentives to work and save.
This Briefing Note reviews developments in welfare policy under the current government and analyses the manifesto proposals of the three main political parties in this policy area.
The Liberal Democrats propose to increase the income tax personal allowance to £10,000 while keeping the level of income at which people start to pay the higher rate of tax unchanged. They say this giveaway would cost £16.8 billion in 2011-12. They also propose a set of significant tax-raising measures, but do their plans add up?
The Liberal Democrats have, once again, claimed that the poor pay more of their income in tax than the rich, and that this gap has got larger under Labour. But, by ignoring the fact that the poor get most of this income from the state in benefit and tax credit payments, and by overstating the extent to which indirect taxes are paid by the poor, this comparison is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
This election briefing note examines the evolution of the tax burden over the last 60 years.
The Conservative Party has announced how it intends to recognise marriage and civil partnerships in the tax system if it forms the next government.
The tax and benefit measures implemented by Labour since 1997 have increased the incomes of poorer households and reduced those of richer ones, largely halting the rapid rise in income inequality we saw under the Conservatives. Despite this, inequality was still slightly higher in 2007-08 than when Labour came to office, according to the first set of Election Briefing Notes to be released by the IFS to help inform public debate during the general election campaign.
The tax and benefit measures implemented by Labour since 1997 have increased the incomes of poorer households and reduced those of richer ones, largely halting the rapid rise in income inequality we saw under the Conservatives. Despite this, inequality was still slightly higher in 2007-08 than when Labour came to office, according to the first set of Election Briefing Notes to be released by the IFS to help inform public debate during the general election campaign.
This Election Briefing Note describes the main tax and benefit reforms since 1997, and shows how they have affected total government revenues.
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 Started: 17 March 2010
Started: 01 November 2009
Started: 01 November 2009
Started: 14 April 2009
Started: 01 April 2008
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 The IFS hosts an ESRC research centre. |
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