Xiaowei Xu

Here we outline an initial response from IFS researchers on the Conservative party manifesto. We take policy areas by turn but this is not a full assessment.

Boris Johnson has announced that he would raise the threshold for paying National Insurance contributions (NICs) on earnings to £9,500 in the first Budget of a Conservative government. Currently 12% NICs is payable on earnings over £8,632 per year, set to rise with inflation to £8,788 in 2020–21.

This presentation was given at the launch of the IFS Green Budget 2019.

IFS researchers presented the key findings from the latest in the series of flagship IFS annual reports on living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the report analysed the latest data on living standards, while setting this in the context of developments in pay, employment and inflation.

This report examines how living standards – most commonly measured by households’ incomes – have changed for different groups in the UK, and the consequences that these changes have for income inequality and for measures of deprivation and poverty. In this latest report, we focus in particular on those people who are poorest in society.

In this short observation, we set out new research about the recent changes to household incomes, and who has been most affected by the recent slowdown in household income growth.

Women work for less productive, lower-paying firms than men, our new analysis suggests - which may contribute to the gender pay gap. This difference between the kinds of firms that men and women work for opens up around the time women have children, when many switch to part-time work or start working closer to home.