 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.
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The Chancellor's tax and spending plans are constrained by two self-imposed fiscal rules: the golden rule and the sustainable investment rule. IFS analysis of the public finances monitors the government's performance with reference to the Treasury's fiscal rules.
Work in this area also looks at forecasts of revenue and spending and aims to inform public debate around the Budget, the Pre-Budget Report and the Spending Review. Part of this dissemination involves writing articles for a variety of non-technical publications, such as Public Finance Magazine. A full listing of news articles authored by IFS staff can be found in our press section. IFS staff carry out monthly analysis of the public finance numbers: these are distributed as press notices and can also be found in our press section. See our Budgets section for more details about Budget and related analyses. Search
In spite of government dominance in financing health care in many countries, the private health care sector remains important.
Joao M.C. Santos Silva and Frank Windmeijer
The demand for certain types of health care services depends on decisions of both the individual and the health care provider.
This commentary assesses the impact of capping on local service provision. In particular it addresses the following questions. What factors determine desired local spending? Did capping constrain spending by local councils? Which local services bore the brunt of any cuts? Did the quality of local services suffer as a result?
This Commentary looks at public pay in detail, tracing its trend relative to the private sector over the 1980s and 1990s and showing how the gap in pay between the public and private sectors differs dramatically across occupations, gender and education groups. These findings illustrate how misleading comparisons of public and private sector pay based on aggregate data can be.
Nicolas Bloom and John Van Reenen
This paper examines the arguments for changing the ways that UK drug prices are regulated.
This report provides a response to the government's proposals. Is the current local government system likely to discourage "over-spending" by councils in the absence of capping powers? Will the government's proposals make the link between local spending decisions and Council Tax bills clearer to voters? Can measures to encourage councils to respond to the views of their residents be successful in making councils more accountable to local people?.
This article assesses the merits of using private finance to deliver public services against three criteria: whether it will lead to additional investment in social infrastructure, whether it represents good value for the taxpayer's money and whether the use of private finance will reduce the public sector's flexibility to pursue its public service objectives.
Carl Emmerson, John Hall and Lindsay Brook
In this commentary, the authors examine public support for more local decision making and increased freedom for local councils to raise council tax levels. They also assess whether local voters would support higher spending on local services such as schools, housing and the police if they had to pay for it directly through higher council tax bills.
Chris Giles and John Hall
The UK experience has been that forecasts of the PSBR have been beset with problems since the
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