Reports

In November 2018, Nigeria declared that its water supply, sanitation and hygiene sector was in crisis. This was partly prompted by the fact that the country has struggled to make progress towards ending open defecation. Almost one in four Nigerians – around 50 million people – defecates in open areas.

From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a ‘one-stop shop’ for childcare and early education, health services, parenting support, and employment advice, with the aim of improving children’s school readiness, health, and social and emotional development.

The tax and benefit system is a key tool for a government trying to reduce inequality. In this briefing note, we examine the effects that cash benefits and taxes had on UK inequality in 2016–17.

This research explored the prevalence of gifting in the general population and how it varied between different groups, based on a new quantitative survey was conducted with a representative sample of adults in Great Britain. The survey also explored the nature of gifting – including the number and value of gifts given, who they were given to, and the motivations for doing so – as well as awareness of inheritance tax rules and exemptions.

This report introduces the IFS Deaton Review, setting out some key background facts, questions and puzzles that will be addressed over the next five years.

This note addresses the questions raised by the HCLG Committee's Local Government Finance and the 2019 Spending Review inquiry.

This is a response to the House of Commons Treasury Committee's call for evidence for their inquiry into the impact of business rates on business.

In this research we investigate who wins and loses from universal credit, and by how much. For the first time, we also look at the effects of universal credit on people’s incomes over eight years of their lives, rather than just at a point in time. This lets us look at the impact on those that are persistently, rather than temporarily, low income.

This Saturday (6 April 2019) marks the start of a new tax year. Unlike many other countries, the UK routinely – and sensibly – uprates the cash values of most tax thresholds and benefit rates each year in line with inflation, in order to maintain their real value.

After five years of recovery from post recession declines, real income growth ground to a complete halt in 2017–18.

Policymakers around the world are concerned that workers aren't saving enough for retirement. But the UK is the only country to have completed a nationwide roll-out of a policy requiring all private sector employers to auto-enrol workers in a pension.

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the question of whether additional taxes should be devolved to English local government. This report considers the options and issues.

This work estimates how government spending is distributed by subject studied and university attended, based on grants and unrepaid student loans (including both tuition and maintenance loans).

We measure the welfare distortions from endogenous quality choice in imperfectly competitive markets.

This note is a response to the consultation from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government concerning the needs and resources of local authorities.

The Chancellor is yet to confirm how much money will be made available to departments at the 2019 Spending Review. To meet his promise to end austerity, Phillip Hammond will need to find billions of extra funding.

While most applications of peer effects that use IV do include the instrument at the individual level and therefore avoid the inconsistency and bias described here, a number of papers have not done so. More generally, we have found no discussion of this issue in the literature. Given the widespread use of IV in peer effects models, we argue that it is important to raise awareness of this among both econometricians and applied researchers.