Reports

The key backdrop to all fiscal events in the UK since the financial crisis has been the weak performance of the economy. At the time of the March 2017 Budget, national income per adult was around 15% lower than it would have been had output per adult instead grown by 2% a year (close to the post-war average) since the start of 2008. Despite this historically poor performance, weak growth was forecast to continue. The March forecast implied that, by 2022, national income per capita would be 18% lower than it would have been if it had grown at 2% per year since 2008. That is astonishing.

This briefing note summarises new research on which types of people under-report the taxes they owe, and what effects audits have on government revenue.

This briefing note presents preliminary results from a study on value added tax (VAT) and tax compliance in the Indian state of West Bengal.

In this report, we focus on understanding the context for the Sanitation Marketing (SanMark) intervention and potential initial impacts, after its gradual development and roll-out to selected treatment areas in the Nigerian states of Ekiti and Enugu.

The Government has introduced substantial reforms to the pay of teachers in the English local authority (LA) maintained sector, to give schools greater freedom to decide how much they pay teachers and how quickly their pay progresses. This study set out to identify what reforms schools were making, what influenced their decisions, and the perceived implications for staff and schools.

This report documents changes in housing tenure and analyses changes in the cost of renting.

A lab experiment is used to identify a potential accomplice effect. A potential accomplice is one with who faces the same incentives and the same moral dilemma. Complicity emerges successfully without connection or communication. Having a potential accomplice increases willingness to lie.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the income threshold above which graduates start making repayments on their student loans would be increased from £21,000 to £25,000 for all those who started university after 2012, and that the cap on tuition fees at English universities would be frozen at its current level of £9,250. This briefing note examimnes the impact on graduates, public finances and universities.

We present a method to estimate preferences in the presence of unobserved choice set heterogeneity.

The government is considering easing the current restraint on the pay of public sector workers. It had previously announced in 2015 that public sector pay scales would only increase by an average of 1% per year up to and including 2019–20. This briefing note describes the trade-offs faced by the government when deciding how to set public sector pay.

This report, jointly written by researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU) and PwC, looks at how the views of councils’ decision-makers relate to the characteristics of the councils they represent or work for.

This briefing note reviews the evidence on the long-run pressures faced by maternity units from changes in the number of maternity admissions and the case mix.

Estimating the responsiveness of top incomes to tax: a summary of three new papers

An informational intervention in Western Kenya

The exposure of households’ food spending to tariff changes and exchange rate movements

This report summary relates to the report, Living standards, poverty and inequality: 2017.

The simplest form of value added tax (VAT) – and the form often advocated by international organisations – is one with a broad base and a single (‘uniform’) rate. In practise, most countries exempt and/or apply lower VAT rates on certain categories of goods and services. In this note authors summarise the pros and cons of such ‘VAT rate differentiation’ that are highlighted in the economics and taxation literatures, paying particular attention to the applicability and relevance of each factor for low- and middle-income countries.

Higher Education funding in England: past, present and options for the future

This is a response by David Phillips, an Associate Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), to the government consultation “100% business rates retention: further consultation on the design of the reformed system”. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author only. The IFS has no corporate views.