Today, the Department for Work and Pensions released the latest official statistics on household incomes, poverty, and income inequality. This observation looks at the key findings from those statistics.
Each year early career economists at IFS deliver a day of public economics talks, aimed at A-level and undergraduate students who have an interest in economics or might want to pursue a career in public policy research. As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, we live streamed a selection of lectures from the series.
The COVID-19 crisis has led to a profound shock to the labour market, one consequence of which is a rising number of claimants of means-tested benefits and higher entitlements among existing claimants.
In this webinar, IFS researchers discussed the options the government faces as it considers unwinding, adjusting, or making permanent the temporary Covid-19 benefit increases; and the opportunities this moment presents to address issues with the system that existed prior to the onset of the crisis.
Recent decades have seen rising wealth-to-income ratios. In England, increases in wealth have been concentrated among older generations. Those born in the 1980s have accumulated no more wealth than those born in the 1970s had done by the same age, but the parents of those born in the 1980s hold 40% more wealth than the parents of those born in the 1970s held at the same age. One consequence is that inherited wealth is on course to be a much more important determinant of lifetime resources for today’s young than it was for previous generations. New work by IFS researchers, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and released today, estimates that the average (median) inheritance of the 1960s generation will be worth 8% of average lifetime earnings for that generation, rising to 14% of lifetime earnings for the 1980s-born generation.
In this report, we use a novel source of real-time data on households’ finances from Money Dashboard, a budgeting app, to explore the impacts of the crisis so far on earnings, incomes and financial distress, and how they are evolving. We complement this with household survey data to explain and verify the key trends.
At this event, IFS researchers present the key findings from their latest flagship annual report on living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
This report examines how living standards – most commonly measured by households’ incomes – were changing in the UK up to approximately the eve of the current COVID-19 crisis, using the latest official household income data covering years up to 2018–19.
In 2019, the employment rate among 25- to 64-year-olds in the UK reached 80% – the highest on record, and considerably higher than the 76% rate recorded shortly before the Great Recession.
