Reports
Reports provide in-depth coverage of findings from substantive research with long-term policy relevance. They are aimed at non-specialists, as well as academics.
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Education spending is the second-largest element of public service spending in the UK behind health, representing about £91 billion in 2018–19 in today’s prices or about 4.2% of national income.
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This study is among the first to rigorously demonstrate potential of life skills interventions to change key outcomes of adolescent girls living in contexts where girls and women continue to be caught in a vicious cycle of low levels of human capital, low labour force participation rate, low wages, ...
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The UK raised 35% of national income in tax in 2018–19. Figure 1 shows that tax as a share of national income has fluctuated between around 30% and 35% of national income since the end of the second world war and been rising since the early 1990s. Tax revenues are now, just, higher as a share of ...
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We have established a new partnership between academics, local government and early years practitioners to develop, implement and evaluate a home-visiting programme for parents with very young children in England. In this feasibility study, we research local priorities and existing services to ...
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Business owners have been the fastest-growing part of the UK labour force since at least 2000. Between 2000–01 and 2015–16, the number of employees grew by 15%, while self-employment (including those operating as a sole trader or as a partner in a partnership) grew by 25% and the number of ...
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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 ...
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In November 2018, Nigeria declared that its water supply, sanitation and hygiene sector was in crisis. This was partly prompted by the fact that the country has struggled to make progress towards ending open defecation. Almost one in four Nigerians – around 50 million people – defecates in ...
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From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a ‘one-stop shop’ for ...
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In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the question of tax devolution to local government. We set out criteria which can be used to assess whether different taxes and tax powers are suitable for devolution, apply these to a range of taxes and look at how much could be raised in ...
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Five years on from the localisation and funding cut for Council Tax Support, this report looks at how local authorities’ Council Tax Support schemes have evolved since they were first introduced, and at the changing effects of these scheme choices on claimants and on local authorities.
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A healthier population is likely to be more economically productive (and to need less spending on healthcare and health-related benefits). A more prosperous society is likely to be healthier.
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This report estimates the impact on earnings of attending HE compared with not going. The authors detail how this varies by subject and institution of study, as well as how these returns vary by gender, prior educational attainment and the sorts of subjects individuals have studied up to age 18. ...
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The IFS Green Budget 2018, in association with Citi, ICAEW and the Nuffield Foundation, is edited by Carl Emmerson, Christine Farquharson and Paul Johnson, and copy-edited by Judith Payne. The report looks at the issues and challenges facing Chancellor Philip Hammond as he prepares for his Budget ...
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The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is responsible for setting the overall direction for social care policy and funding in England. Recently DHSC has developed in-house modelling capacity to examine likely implications of possible reforms to the system for funding social care. This ...
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Our first annual report on education spending in England provides measures of spending per student in the early years, schools, further education and higher education back to the early 1990s.
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English local government finance is part way through a series of major changes that will see its focus shift from being based on redistribution according to spending needs, towards more emphasis on providing financial incentives to tackle needs and increase local revenue-raising capacity. In this ...
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There is a large gender gap in the likelihood of taking maths and physics at A-level, even among high-achieving pupils. Among pupils who achieved grade A or A* (equivalent to grades 7-9) in GCSE maths in 2010, 36.5% of girls compared to 51.1% of boys took maths A-level. Among those who achieved ...
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The last 25 years have seen two periods of public expenditure restraint in the UK (the 1990s and the 2010s) and one period of increased spending (between 2000 and 2010). Over that whole time, the Treasury has been responsible for controlling government spending, setting fiscal rules and the overall ...
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To mark the BBC’s coverage of the NHS’s 70th birthday in July 2018, researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Health Foundation, The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust have come together for the first time, using combined expertise to shed light on some of the big questions on the ...
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This report examines changes in the distribution of household incomes in the UK, and the determinants and consequences of recent trends. This includes analysing changes not only in average living standards but also in household income inequality and measures of income poverty and deprivation.