Poverty, inequality and social mobility

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century.

The first half of the report sheds some new light on the following questions with a detailed and consistent comparison of income distributions in Western Germany and the UK from 1984 to 1992. To what extent was the income distribution in Western Germany similar to the UK in 1984? Did the inequality of West German incomes rise to the same extent? What was the differing role of the labour market, the tax and benefit system and demographic change in each country? The second half of the report concentrates on whether and how education, training and wage setting systems together with other institutional factors in Western Germany can explain the differences relative to the more deregulated UK labour market.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting. It highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality.

This book presents the results of the analysis discussed at a conference in July 1996 for users and providers of Family Expenditure Survey Data

This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages.

In this Commentary, the authors look at the likely effects that real year-by-year increases in road fuel duties will have on the use of cars by households and on their economic welfare, with particular attention to the distributional consequences.

In this paper we show how estimates of aggregate spending in the UK would be affected by using grossing weights that take account of the known dimensions of non-representativeness of the Family Expenditure Survey.

The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component.

This research is concerned with the demand for lottery tickets and uses data for the UK National Lottery that records the behaviour, incomes and characteristics of almost 10,000 individuals.

Methods of testing econometrically for horizontal inequity (HI) induced by tax systems are examined.

A common feature of federal systems is that tax bases are joint property.

Smoothed estimates of the complex relationships between age and intakes of energy, fat, calcium and vitamin C are obtained for males and females from British National Food Survey data covering the period 197494.

This report shows the extent to which low pay and unemployment are related, the effects of periods out of work on future earnings and the degree to which low pay is a persistent phenomenon. Importantly it demonstrates the way in which a minimum wage might affect a much higher proportion of the population than is generally appreciated because of the way in which people move in and out of low paid work. A chapter of the report is also given over to the effects of work experience and job tenure on pay levels.

This paper illustrates recent trends in household consumption and personal savings in the UK and the US and discusses some theoretical models that can be used to interpret them.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.

One-and-a-half million pensioners are dependent on the minimum means-tested benefit, income support.

The Hicks-Leontief composite commodity theorem permits aggregation of sets of goods that have identical price movements into composite groups of goods, each of which can be treated like a single good for demand analysis.

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners.