By the time the pandemic is over, most children across the UK will have missed over half a year of normal, in-person schooling. This observation sets out the economic case for a massive national plan to address this crisis.
This short briefing note sets out what we know about those excluded from the government's Self-Employment Income Support Scheme and what options the government has for extending it to them.
The temporary £20 per week increase in Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit enacted at the start of the pandemic is due to expire at the end of March. Some campaigners have called for it to be extended for another year or made permanent, while the government are said to be considering instead a £500 one off bonus to benefit recipients.
Last week, the IFS published research on how the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on consumer spending and behaviour has varied across the country. In a new observation, we consider the implications of this research for local government.
The past nine months have seen huge swings in households’ spending, both in total and across various goods and services. In this briefing note, we analyse the geographical patterns of these changes.
How to allocate vaccines over heterogeneous individuals is one of the important policy decisions in pandemic times. This paper develops a procedure to estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy under limited supply, exploiting social network data containing individual demographic characteristics and health status.
In this paper, we estimate the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on mental health in the UK. We use longitudinal micro data for the UK over the period 2009–20 to control for pre‐existing trends in mental health and construct individual‐specific counterfactual predictions for April 2020, against which the COVID‐19 mental health outcomes can be assessed.
MPs will debate a number of petitions today relating to university tuition fees. These petitions are asking for all or part of tuition fees for the 2019/20 or 2020/21 academic year to be reimbursed. Between them, they have gathered nearly a million signatures.
The measures taken to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, resulting from both policy and consumers’ changes in behaviour, have had major impacts on consumer spending patterns. In this briefing note, we explore how consumer spending has evolved, both during lockdown and in the recovery phase since.
Last week saw significant political debate about the amount of extra funding being given to English councils moving into tier 3 (‘very high alert’) of the government’s COVID alert system. Most of the attention focused on funding to help pay for additional business support measures – such as grants for businesses legally able to open but facing big falls in demand – on top of those being funded directly by central government.
In this briefing note, we use comprehensive real-time data on grocery purchases and prices in Great Britain to show how inflation and promotional activity has evolved up until the beginning of August 2020.
Figures out today from the ONS show that headline inflation over the year to September was just 0.5%. With earlier figures showing a fall in earnings of 1% this means that under the “triple lock” next April would see the basic state pension and new state pension both increase by 2½%. This would bring the increase in the basic state pension over the last eleven years up to 41%, compared to 25% if it had been indexed in line with inflation or by 22% if it had been indexed in line with earnings.
