Working age benefits

The principal of horizontal equity can be interpreted as requiring that households with the same pre-transfer incomes and the same consumption needs should receive the same post-transfer incomes.

This Commentary looks at two asset-based welfare policies and asks how they might work and what rationale lies behind them.

Over the past 20 years the incidence of relative poverty among Britain's children has tripled.

This commentary discusses the rationale for directing financial support to families with children and assesses options for a new integrated child credit.

This paper uses a sample of lone mothers (and former lone mothers who are now repartnered) drawn from the 1997 Family Resources Survey to analyse the potential effects of reforming the UK system of child support.

This commentary looks at the impact of taxing child benefit under a number of scenarios. This involves analysis of the amount of revenue raised, the distributional impact of using this revenue to increase the rate of child benefit and the administrative issues encountered under particular tax treatments. In addition, the commentary examines the implications of taxing child benefit for the future direction of tax system reform.

A survey of the main issues involved in using equivalence scales to estimate the costs of children for policy purposes: the authors estimate a range of scales for the UK and examine the impact of varying scales on official statistics.