Fiscal rules and frameworks

This presentation was given to Government Economic Service officials at an HM Revenue & Customs conference on the Economics of Tax held in London on 20 October 2014.

This presentation was given to officials of the Indian Revenue Service on the Indian Institute of Management programme at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, on 18 September 2014.

This presentation was delivered to the annual conference of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy on 2nd July 2014.

Government is a game of two halves — the spending half and the taxing half. If the latter isn’t pretty much as big as the former then in the long run we’ll be in trouble. To fund all the schools and hospitals, police and armed forces, roads and pensions, we pay more than £600bn in tax each year. That’s about £4 in every £10 generated by the economy.

This presentation was given at the CASE social exclusion seminar in June 2014.

In this article for the Daily Mail, Paul Johnson considers the efficacy of a flat tax to simplify the tax system.

This paper was presented at the Fiscal Rules Roundtable at the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 21 May 2014. This event formed part of a programme of work funded by the ESRC entitled "Combining micro- and macro- economic approaches to fiscal policy evaluation"

This presentation was given in Uppsala in May 2014.

Last week the Prime Minister, David Cameron, stated that he would like to increase the inheritance tax threshold, reviving memories of the 2010 Conservative Party manifesto pledge to increase the threshold to £1 million. This observation sets out how much this would cost, who would benefit and sets out arguments for alternative reforms to inheritance tax.

This paper was given at the 2014 post Budget briefing on 20 March 2014.

This presentation was given at the IFS post-Budget briefing on 20 March 2014.

This presentation was delivered to BBC journalists in advance of the Budget 2014.

Today, the Scottish Government published the latest version of its annual Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland (GERS) publication. For the first time in 5 years GERS suggests that Scotland's net fiscal balance, or budget deficit, was worse than that of the UK as a whole even when allocating North Sea revenues to Scotland on an illustrative geographic basis. Until now these revenues have been enough to more than outweigh the higher public spending per head in Scotland than in the rest of the UK. But not in 2012–13.

This presentation was given at Central European University, Budapest, on 7th March 2014.

The deep cuts to the public sectors mean that unprotected departments will have budgets slashed.