Reports

Health insurance and child health: evidence from Mexico

This briefing note is the first output in a programme of work seeking to understand the gender wage gap and its relationship to poverty. Section 1 sets out what we mean by the gender wage gap, how it differs according to education level and how it has evolved over time and across generations. Section 2 provides some descriptive evidence on how the gender wage gap relates to the presence of dependent children and the employment outcomes associated with that.

The UK higher education sector has expanded remarkably over the past three decades. In 1993, 13% of 25- to 29-year-olds had first degrees or higher degrees. By 2015, this had roughly tripled to 41%. Naturally, one may wonder whether the big expansion has reduced the economic returns to having a first degree. We have all heard stories about graduate unemployment and graduates employed in low-wage jobs. But what do the data show and what can we learn from history?

On 23 June 2016, the UK public voted in favour of leaving the European Union. However, important decisions remain about the model for the UK’s relationship with Europe outside of the EU, not least whether the UK seeks to remain a ‘member’ of the Single Market or only seeks (tariff-free) ‘access’. This report looks at exactly what the Single Market is and distinguishes between ‘membership’ and ‘access’, including the impact on the financial services sector. It also considers the potential for new trade deals beyond the EU and assesses the economic and public finance implications of the various options. This should inform the likely trade-offs between the level of access to the Single Market and other negotiating objectives such as control of immigration and budgetary contributions.

The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. We assess the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014–15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years.

This report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, shows how routes into teaching have changed in recent years, and looks at the costs, benefits and retention rates for each route.

This report, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is the fifteenth in an annual series published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). It analyses the HBAI statistics and digs deeper to explore the driving forces behind key trends in living standards, inequality and poverty.

In this project, we have partnered with Lambeth Council to design a randomised controlled trial that tests the efficacy of different incentives for citizens to involve themselves in the co-production of public services.

The first component of the centre’s work involves partnering with the Governments of Ghana and Ethiopia to co-produce modelling tools and analyses of the key tax and benefit policy and administration issues that these countries face.

This paper provides a comprehensive comparison of the financial incentive to work in Ireland and the UK. It uses closely harmonised tax and benefit microsimulation models for both countries, based on household survey data, to provide an accurate and representative picture of the financial incentive to be in employment and to progress facing key groups in both countries.

Many low-income countries face the hefty challenge of increasing sanitation coverage, in both rural and urban areas, which demand different solutions. In response, governments, with support from international agencies, bilateral donors and non-government organisations, are deploying a range of programmes and policies to accelerate progress towards the new global goals. Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is one popular approach. CLTS works with an entire community to identify the negative effects of poor sanitation, especially the practice of open defecation, and empowers them to collectively find solutions. CLTS is understood to be more suitable for small, rural and homogeneous communities, however it is still considered an appropriate solution for more urbanised areas. In this brief, we provide quantitative evidence to support this conjecture and bring forward a simple rule of thumb that allows more efficient programme targeting. We suggest that using this information can improve the targeting of CLTS in Nigeria, and possibly other countries, freeing up scarce resources to identify and test complementary sanitation approaches suitable for more urbanised communities.

This report examines both the direct and indirect effects of Brexit on the UK’s public finances, based on a comprehensive review of studies analysing the short- and long- term economic effects of Brexit.

Private pension saving is a key component of retirement saving in the UK. The most recent data available shows that four-tenths of private household wealth is held in private pensions. Among those aged 55 to 64 nearly 73 percent had accumulated some private pension rights, with the median holding among those with some pension rights being £149,300 (Office for National Statistics 2015). This is partly explained by the fact that holding savings in pensions is, on average, tax favoured relative to other saving vehicles. The fact that large amounts are placed in private pensions also makes it important that the tax treatment of such savings is well-designed.

Between 2007–08 and 2009–10, total government receipts collapsed – they fell by over 9% in real terms and were 2% lower as a proportion of national income – largely as a result of the financial crisis and resulting recession. By the end of this decade, government receipts are forecast to be 37.2% of national income,2 a little lower than in 2007–08 (37.5%) but higher than in 2009–10 (35.8%) and 2015–16 (36.3%) and a little higher than the average level over the two decades before the recession (36.4%). On the face of it, these aggregate numbers imply that, by 2020–21, we will be more or less back where we started, raising around the same proportion of national income in revenue as just before the crisis. However, this masks considerable changes in the composition of receipts.

The government has committed to freezing school spending per pupil in cash terms in England up to 2019–20. It has also committed to introducing a national funding formula for schools in England from 2017 onwards. In this report, we provide historical context for these changes by showing how spending per pupil has evolved since the 1970s – comparisons that were previously unavailable. We also provide the first estimates of total school spending received across different cohorts over time and the variation within individual cohorts.

This Executive Summary accompanies a new IFS working paper which uses administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socioeconomic background.

This report is the first of several that the IFS will produce in the run up to the EU referendum that will look at these public finance and budgetary issues.

Unemployment has devastating effects on people’s economic and social circumstances. Its negative effects on mental health and subjective well-being are also well documented. However, until now, there has been no quantitative evaluation of the moral consequences of unemployment. Here, using behavioral experiments and a novel subject engagement strategy, we present evidence that becoming unemployed erodes the extent to which a person acknowledges earned entitlement, i.e., acknowledges an individual’s right to that gained through his or her own effort or endeavor. This finding has important implications for the way we should think about economic and political systems. It indicates that, in addition to a causal link running from values and preferences to outcomes, there exists a feedback loop from outcomes to values that needs to be taken into account when considering system dynamics.

This paper is a response to the House of Commons Treasury Committee's call for evidence for their inquiry into UK tax policy and the tax base.

In the recent Budget, the Chancellor introduced a tax on the sugar content of soft drinks, citing concerns about childhood obesity. This tax will be introduced in 2018 and will not apply to fruit juices or milk-based drinks. It has followed calls from various bodies for intervention to reduce people’s sugar consumption. In this briefing note, we provide some descriptive evidence on the main sources of dietary sugar and we lay out some of the economic issues related to the introduction of a tax on sugar.