Living standards

'If women hadn’t become better-educated than men, we might well be looking at pay and employment gaps barely changed in the past quarter of a century.'

We sought to determine whether areas with higher levels of socioeconomic deprivation or larger ethnic minority populations saw larger falls in emergency and planned admissions in England.

This observation looks at how today’s high inflation figures are affecting different income groups.

The growth of international trade has had profound effects on the labour markets and even the politics of high-income countries. This online event focused on what economists have learned about how trade affects inequality in rich countries over the past two decades.

Why do we care about inequality? What should be done about it? This lecture explores the debate over which inequalities the government should act to reduce, and why.

"When economic inequalities start to undermine our sense of equal citizenship, as they seem to have done in the UK, then the need for action becomes urgent."

At this event, our speakers presented new work undertaken for the ground-breaking IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, examining people’s attitudes towards inequalities and how these fit with different traditions of philosophical thought on the topic.

This is the third in a series of online events looking in detail at the three major economic challenges identified by the Tirole-Blanchard Commission, featuring presentations by Axel Börsch-Supan, Claudia Diehl, and Carol Propper.

At this event, IFS researchers presented the key findings from their latest report on "Why do wealthy parents have wealthy children?", funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

"We’ll know we are on the way to levelling up when differences in health and life expectancy across the country start to drop. Sadly, that’s one measure of inequality that has clearly been moving in the wrong direction over the past decade." Paul Johnson writes for The Times on levelling up.

At this IFS event, Olivier Blanchard, Professor Emeritus at MIT and former Chief Economist at the IMF, and Jean Tirole, Nobel Prize-winner and Honorary President of the Toulouse School of Economics, presented their report on the major future economic challenges.

This report examines how household incomes were changing in the UK up to the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how other measures of household living standards have changed over the course of the pandemic.

At this event, IFS researchers presented the key findings from their latest flagship annual report on living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.