Our goal at the Institute for Fiscal Studies is to promote effective economic and social policies by better understanding how policies affect individuals, families, businesses and the government's finances.
On Wednesday, the Chancellor announced an increase in spending on public services for next year. This press release sets out our initial response to the spending review.
The rest of the country may be getting a little worked up about the prorogation of parliament, but it’s another breach with precedent that is worrying me, getting only one week’s notice of the date of the spending review.
This Wednesday the Chancellor will allocate funding to departments for the next financial year, 2020-2021. In this briefing note, researchers argue that the government is set to take big spending decisions with little idea how sustainable they will prove.
Imran Rasul, co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, will give the keynote address at the 11th Transatlantic Workshop on the Economics of Crime in Amsterdam on the 26th-27th September.
Events
Upcoming event
| Date | 19 September 2019 | 10:00 - 12:00 |
| Location | Church House Conference Centre, London |
| Availablity | Places available |
At this event, IFS researchers will be launching their second annual report on education spending in England, supported by the Nuffield Foundation. This will provide consistent measures of day-to-day spending per pupil in England across the four main stages of education stretching back to the early 1990s.
Upcoming event
| Date | 23 September 2019 | 14:30 - 15:30 |
| Location | Hilton Metropole, Brighton |
| Availablity | Places available |
The Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Institute for Government are organising joint panel discussions at the main party conferences this autumn, looking at the end of austerity and the spending review.
Upcoming event
| Date | 26 September 2019 | 18:30 - 20:00 |
| Location | The Royal Society, London |
| Availablity | Places available |
We’re pleased to announce that Professor Pinelopi (Penny) Koujianou Goldberg, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group, will give the 2019 IFS Annual Lecture on the unequal effects of globalisation.
Publications and research
School spending covers pupils in state-funded schools aged 5–16, as well as pupils aged 16–18 in school sixth forms. In 2018–19, total school spending in England – excluding early years and sixth-form funding – stood at about £44 billion in 2019–20 prices.
The richest members of our society get a lot of attention. Much of the public conversation about economic inequality is concerned with, loosely, the top 1%, how different they are from the rest, how they got to where they are, and what – if anything – policy should do about it.
Our new PM and Chancellor have pledged big spending increases before they know the shape and cost of Brexit. "We really should be consigning austerity to history, but we are in danger of talking our way into another dose of it", writes Paul Johnson.
Members of the IFS Deaton Review panel will meet at the 34th Congress of the European Economic Association in Manchester to discuss recent changes in inequalities and the challenges for economics and for policy.
In the UK, tax revenues as a share of national income are high by historical standards but lower than in many other developed countries. So how do other countries raise more in tax than the UK?
Professor Imran Rasul, Co-director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS and Professor of Economics at University College London, has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy.