Living standards

In this Commentary, the authors look at the likely effects that real year-by-year increases in road fuel duties will have on the use of cars by households and on their economic welfare, with particular attention to the distributional consequences.

Methods of testing econometrically for horizontal inequity (HI) induced by tax systems are examined.

This report shows the extent to which low pay and unemployment are related, the effects of periods out of work on future earnings and the degree to which low pay is a persistent phenomenon. Importantly it demonstrates the way in which a minimum wage might affect a much higher proportion of the population than is generally appreciated because of the way in which people move in and out of low paid work. A chapter of the report is also given over to the effects of work experience and job tenure on pay levels.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.

One-and-a-half million pensioners are dependent on the minimum means-tested benefit, income support.

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners.

This report analyses the changing economic positions of tenants in subsidised public housing. It shows how low their incomes are today, how these low incomes interact with higher rents and the housing benefit system to reduce their returns to work and looks at a number of reforms to the benefit system.

Is Britain a highly mobile society, or are affluence and poverty largely transmitted from one generation to the next? This report suggests that the economic standing of parents is an extremely important determinant of where their children end up in the income distribution.

Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.

The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.

This study is based on a new data source, the BHPS, which allows researchers to follow the fortunes of the same households from one year to the next. It finds that the poorest tenth of households in 1992 were on average around 3% worse off in real terms than the poorest tenth in 1991, but that this result was mainly attributable to previously non-poor households becoming worse off.

Much of the debate over inequality in the UK has focused on household incomes. This study provides details of trends in household spending levels. It finds that the inequality of household expenditures has risen much more slowly over the 1980s than the inequality of household incomes.

The consumption of utilities (for example, energy and water), along with that of other goods such as food, clothing, shelter, health and education, is often thought of as something that has particular distributional significance.

In this paper we examine the concept of intergenerational mobility in earnings and in lifetime or 'permanent' status, and discuss its measurement using regression and quantile transition matrix approaches.

A new procedure for measuring horizontal inequity and vertical equity in the income tax is proposed, for which the "equals" under the tax law are socioeconomic groups, and the equal treatment norm is a command that, for equity, these groups should face the same tax schedule.