Living standards

This note examines the changes in living standards, inequality and poverty.

Over the past 20 years the incidence of relative poverty among Britain's children has tripled.

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs.

In this paper we describe the household wealth distribution in the US and UK, and compare both wealth inequality and the form in which wealth is held.

Analysts should correct for distributional differences before undertaking local progressivity comparisons between income tax or tax and benefit schedules. A transplant-and-compare procedure is advocated, involving 'importation' of the schedule from one regime into another, or from both into a reference scenario. The residual progression ordering over transplanted schedules then assures a global ordering of original regimes by Lorenz or Suits curves. The algorithm is advocated for use only when transplantation functions are isoelastic, and is illustrated for the Canadian, Israeli and UK tax and benefit systems.

The Greater London Assembly is considering the introduction of a congestion charge for central London. This paper looks at what the costs of such a charge might be for different income groups.

This paper looks at the strategy of cutting Vehicle Excise Duty for people living in rural areas, and asks whether this would be an effective way of helping those most in need.

This paper exploits an unusual policy reform that had the effect of reducing the direct cost of schooling in Ireland in the late 1960s.

Building on previous work, this paper documents the changes in income inequality that have occurred over the past 20 years, right up until the late 1990s.

Significant change was made to both tax and benefits systems during the period 19972001.

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century.

The first half of the report sheds some new light on the following questions with a detailed and consistent comparison of income distributions in Western Germany and the UK from 1984 to 1992. To what extent was the income distribution in Western Germany similar to the UK in 1984? Did the inequality of West German incomes rise to the same extent? What was the differing role of the labour market, the tax and benefit system and demographic change in each country? The second half of the report concentrates on whether and how education, training and wage setting systems together with other institutional factors in Western Germany can explain the differences relative to the more deregulated UK labour market.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting. It highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality.

This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages.