Rapid increases in pump prices have sparked renewed debate on the level of fuel duties, with calls for the Chancellor to cancel April's planned real-terms increase in the forthcoming Budget. There is also continued speculation about the prospect of a "fair fuel stabiliser". What are the facts and how should we assess these proposals?

The Government has announced a pupil premium of £430 per pupil eligible for free school meals no matter where they live in England. This is a simple and transparent policy, which should make the financial incentives generated by the pupil premium that much clearer. The combination of a freeze in existing funding per pupil and the new pupil premium means that less deprived schools will see larger cuts than more deprived schools, some of whom will receive a small increase in funding.

The Government defends its intention to scrap EMA - and replace it with a smaller payment - on the grounds that the EMA is expensive and fails to deliver enough bang for its buck. But what does the evidence on the effectiveness of the EMA show?

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, yesterday confirmed that a Patent Box will be introduced in the UK in 2013. This policy will reduce the rate of corporation tax on the income derived from patents to 10%. Our analysis suggests that the policy will lead to a large reduction in UK tax receipts from the income derived from patents, is poorly targeted at promoting research, will add complexity to the tax system, and it is far from clear that any additional research resulting from the policy will take place in the UK.

Last week, the Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, announced the Government's proposals for higher education funding in England, in response to last month's publication of the Browne Review. IFS released some initial reaction to these proposals last week. Here we quantify the main implications of that announcement.

The Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, has today announced the Government's proposals for higher education (HE) funding in England, in response to last month's publication of the Browne Review. Here we outline our initial response to this release.

In recent months, there has been much speculation that the Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) will be abolished or restricted as part of the forthcoming programme of spending cuts. In this observation we contribute to this debate by summarising what the WFP does, and does not, achieve.

Lord Browne's recommendations for higher education funding have provoked controversy. The potential sharp increase in tuition fees has grabbed the headlines, but another proposed measure has also received considerable attention: increasing the interest rate on student loans to 2.2% above RPI inflation. There have also been criticisms of the review's alleged lack of focus on the potential for a graduate tax. In this Observation, we explore both issues in some detail.

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'

The Spending Review, to be finalised later this month, will provide detail regarding the large reductions in spending on public services that will be implemented over the next four years. The estimation of the distributional impacts of cuts in spending on public services is substantially more challenging than the estimation of the distributional impact of changes to taxation and the payment of cash benefits. For many reasons analyses of the former should be interpreted very cautiously.