This note outlines the preliminary findings of the evaluation of a welfare programme in Colombia, Familias en Accíon. The programme aims to foster nutritional and educational development for the children of poor families in rural and urban communities, and the evaluation will use data collected from treatment and control areas to discover what methods are effective and how they work. In this note, we describe what the data show about the population and what the preliminary findings indicate about the efficacy of the programme.

This Briefing Note provides an overview of public spending in the UK. It describes the components of public spending and examines trends in expenditure.

The UK's poor productivity performance relative to the US has been a focus for government policy and analysis in recent Budgets and Pre-Budget Reports. The labour productivity gap fell over the early 1990s, when the UK experienced relatively faster growth in business sector labour productivity than the US, but it has since increased again as productivity growth slowed in the UK and accelerated in the US. This aggregate picture hides considerable variation at the industry level. In some industries the gap has narrowed substantially over the past decade, while in others it has widened. As a result, although the total size of the productivity gap did not change very much over the 1990s, the industries that account for the majority of the gap have changed considerably. An understanding of where the productivity gap arises is essential to be able to target policy effectively.

The government has a target for child poverty to fall to 3.1 million by 2004-05, measured by the number of children in households with less than 60% median income after housing costs. The latest data showed that 3.8 million children (30% of children in Britain) were in poverty in 2001-02 on this definition. To help achieve the target, increases to means-tested benefits and tax credits need to take effect in April 2004, and therefore need to be announced in the forthcoming Pre-Budget Report.

In August 2003 the government issued a further consultation document on reform to the corporation tax system.This consultation continues a process that started in July 2001 with a consultation document on large business taxation, and which appears to have become an annual exercise. This Briefing Note points out that this annual round of reform proposals does little to promote a stable environment for business investment decisions. New proposals on transfer pricing and finance leasing will add to business costs.

On 6 October 2003, the pension credit replaced the minimum income guarantee as the principal means-tested benefit for families containing an individual aged 60 or over. This Briefing Note examines the impact of this reform.

There is a strong consensus that the British general election successes of the Labour Party in 1997 and 2001 owed much to attracting and retaining support from amongst the 'middle-class' voters of 'middle Britain'. But are the supposed residents of middle Britain in the middle of the income distribution? In this briefing note, we look at where we might find the 'middle classes' in the income distribution, and at the pattern of income distribution more generally.

Understanding why the UK has performed relatively poorly in terms of R&D is important for predicting whether current policies can halt this decline and ultimately narrow the productivity gap. This Briefing Note documents and disentangles trends in UK R&D over the period 1981-2000.

In this Briefing Note, we discuss whether or not the government's proposed reforms are likely to help individuals to make choices about how to provide for their retirement that are appropriate to their circumstances. We focus particularly on whether or not the proposals might prompt those individuals who are not thought to be providing sufficiently for their retirement to save more each year or to retire at an older age than might otherwise have been the case.

The child tax credit and working tax credit were introduced in April 2003. When fully operational, the child tax credit will represent the majority of government financial support for children. It is designed to simplify the system of financial support for parents, and provides support that is means-tested against family income. The working tax credit is designed to make work more financially attractive. It means that people with or without children in work and on a low income may receive extra help from the State. This Briefing Note looks at the changes that have been made and asks why the new tax credits have been introduced, how they work, the cost and distributional impact, the impact on work incentives and what levels of take-up we might expect.