Poverty, inequality and social mobility

The consumption of utilities (for example, energy and water), along with that of other goods such as food, clothing, shelter, health and education, is often thought of as something that has particular distributional significance.

A new procedure for measuring horizontal inequity and vertical equity in the income tax is proposed, for which the "equals" under the tax law are socioeconomic groups, and the equal treatment norm is a command that, for equity, these groups should face the same tax schedule.

Inequality of post-tax income among pre-tax equals is evaluated and aggregated to form a global index of horizontal inequity in the income tax.

Two competing explanations of the UK consumer boom in the late 1980s are the financial liberalisation-imperfect housing market hypothesis of Muellbauer and Murphy and the expectations hypothesis of King. The authors use 15 years of Family Expenditure Surveys, and cohort analysis, to investigate to what extent these two hypotheses agree with observed changes in consumption patterns.

This article describes the changing patterns in income inequality and real living standards over the last 30 years.

This report provides, for the first time ever, a consistently defined picture of living standards in the UK over the last three decades. Looking in detail at patterns in income inequality, and at the changing fortunes of the richest and the poorest, this report puts the trends of the 1980s into the context of 30 years.

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption.

Very little is known about how households hold their savings, if they have any at all. This study shows how the amount and nature of household saving and wealth vary across different household types.

Measures of average inflation like the RPI cannot, by definition, capture the true cost-of-living increases faced by individual households. This report looks at the extent to which a range of households have had different experiences of inflation over the last 15 years.

The only circumstance under which one can speak accurately about <i>the</i> cost-of-living index is one in which household expenditure patterns do not vary.