Consumption and prices

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

Taxes on alcohol are among the oldest in the UK and are still an important source of tax revenue.

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.

This report looks at some of the economic issues surrounding the current system of alcohol taxes in the UK and considers how far current taxes on alcohol are sustainable as European integration proceeds.

We argue that once one departs from simple classroom example, or 'stripped down life-cycle model', the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data.

In this paper we use household level data on income and expenditure to analyse the importance of precautionary saving in the UK.

Two competing explanations of the UK consumer boom in the late 1980s are the financial liberalisation-imperfect housing market hypothesis of Muellbauer and Murphy and the expectations hypothesis of King. The authors use 15 years of Family Expenditure Surveys, and cohort analysis, to investigate to what extent these two hypotheses agree with observed changes in consumption patterns.

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption.

Measures of average inflation like the RPI cannot, by definition, capture the true cost-of-living increases faced by individual households. This report looks at the extent to which a range of households have had different experiences of inflation over the last 15 years.

The only circumstance under which one can speak accurately about <i>the</i> cost-of-living index is one in which household expenditure patterns do not vary.