With the passing of the Finance Act of 1979 the new system of Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT) became law.

The case which Mr Richardson makes for the general adoption of some effective form of inflation accounting for business purposes is unanswerable.

The title I have chosen for tonight covers an important group of questions, which have been much in the forefront of discussion in recent years.

Nearly all food prices in Europe are now determined, not by market forces, but by the operation of the Common Agricultural Policy.

In July, the research staff of the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced an index, the Gross Earnings Deflator (GED), which was designed to show how much, on average, the gross earnings of the working population need to increase to compensate them for changes in inflation and the tax system. The government's new Taxes and Prices Index (TPI), first published in August, is similar in intention and construction

There is now a compelling case for reforming British budgetary practice.

A few years ago it looked as if the North Sea tax system, like other aspects of UK oil policy, might succumb to that national weakness of ours known as 'adversary politics'.

One of the original, if unstated, objectives of the Housing Finance Review initiated in 1975 was to provide a systematic comparison of the distribution of housing subsidies across categories of households differentiated by tenure and other characteristics.

This is that, when inflation reaches anything like 10 percent p.a., it becomes essential to find ways of measuring companies' real profits and that it is these 'real' profits (however defined) which should form the basis of such matters as pricing policy, dividend distributions, and taxation.