This Commentary presents a detailed analysis of the latest figures and recent trends.

The IFS Green Budget examines the Chancellor's options for the Budget 2004.

In this commentary, IFS compares the reforms proposed by the two parties, looking at the effect on student and graduate finances, the distributional impact on households with different incomes, and the cost to the Exchequer and taxpayers in general.

This commentary reviews the government's tax and benefit reforms affecting pensioners to date, and examines the evidence from the latest official low income figures on the government's record on pensioner poverty so far.

The Green Budget looks at the Chancellor's options for his March Budget.

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children.

The main measure of inflation in the UK is the retail price index (RPI). One way to think of the RPI is as a measure of the changing cost of buying a very large shopping basket containing all of the purchases of a typical UK household. There is, of course, no such thing as a typical household. As a result, inflation varies across the household population, and it would be remarkable if the RPI were a good measure of inflation for every household. This IFS commentary explores the issues surrounding the extent and the implications of differences in inflation rates between households.

In this commentary, the authors examine the effect of stamp duty on the stock market, on business investment and on merger and acquisition activity. They consider possible threats to the long-run sustainability of stamp duty revenues. The commentary goes on to assess the potential revenue implications of abolition for the government and to examine various means by which the revenues could be recouped. Each of these involves its own potential economic distortions and possible additional administrative costs.

Before the 2001 election the Treasury said that `tax and benefit reforms announced in this Parliament will lift over 1.2 million children out of relative poverty’. But official figures released on 11 April show a smaller fall in child poverty, of only 0.5 million since 1996-97. This commentary attempts to explain the discrepancy.

The Green Budget 2002 looks at the options open to the Chancellor in his March Budget.