Paul has been director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies since 2011. He is a columnist for The Times, and is a regular contributor to other broadcast and print media. He is a visiting professor in the UCL Policy Lab and at the UCL department of economics.
He was for 10 years a member of the UK Climate Change Committee, and has served on the council of the ESRC and of the Royal Economic Society. Paul led reviews of pension auto-enrolment and of inflation measurement for the UK government, and of fiscal devolution for the Northern Ireland executive.
Previous roles have included time as chief economist at the Department for Education and as director of public spending at HM Treasury, where he also served as deputy head of the government economic service.
Paul published the Sunday Times bestseller “Follow the Money” in 2023.
He was appointed CBE in the 2018 birthday honours.
Education
MSc Economics, Birkbeck, University of London, 1992
BA (1st Class) Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Oxford, 1988
This commentary analyses three seperate studies which attempt to assess the extent of poverty in the UK and asks why these studies produced apparently different results.
This commentary concentrates on the particular issues raised by environmental taxation, in the form of the additional tax burden and its distribution accross households.
So wrote the all-party House of Commons Social services select committee in its report (HMSO(1988)) on the new Department of Social Security series of low income statistics 'Households Below Average Income' which were published for the first time in May 1988 (DSS(1988a)).
In the ten year period of Mrs Thatcher's government, and especially over the last few years, there have been many changes to the tax and benefit system.
