Government finances and spending

The purpose of this paper is to review the differing treatment of fringe benefits for income tax and National Insurance purposes, to determine whether there should be different bases for the treatment of fringe benefits in these two areas.

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.

A report considering how effective means-tested benefits are at reaching the right people. The most comprehensive study of take-up ever undertaken, it gives a detailed breakdown of the results.

This commentary surveys some of the issues that should be on the Government's mind if it wishes to look after the economy's microeconomic foundations.

Few subjects can have received so much serious study recently as the reform of corporate taxation.

This commentary provides assessment and analysis of the three main parties' tax and social security proposals.

It is widely agreed that, in the absence of specific corrective aims, the corporate tax system should aim for neutrality.

This report by the Capital Taxes Group examines what impact distortions have on the taxation of capital and whether or not these are an unavoidable consequence of governments' desire to tax companies.

Corporation tax in the UK is based on an estimate of historic cost company profits.

In this commentary we describe in detail reforms taking place to local authority finances and analyse their effects on local authorities and local tax payers.

Although it is now over twenty years since the European Commission first published proposals concerning the harmonisation of corporate taxes, the debate on the desirablility of any such reform has not yet achieved a high political profile.

The difficulties encountered in forecasting social security expenditure (significantly underpredicted for much of the 1980s) have long been a source of concern-not least to officials in the DSS.