Reports

Labor force participation of men over age 50 fell sharply in the UK between the early 1970s and early 1990s.

In this report we describe the charitable giving behaviour of UK households over the last two decades.

The Green Budget outlines the macroeconomic background, assesses the fiscal stance, and then considers a wide range of tax and spending issues that will be on the Chancellor's pre-budget agenda.

Recommendations for the way Parliament handles Tax Simplification Bills are made in this report by a working party of the Tax Law Review Committee.

The main conclusions of this report are that tax legislation should be written in plain English, that the Government should publish explanatory memoranda with all Finance Bills, that the project already announced by the Government, to rewrite existing tax legislation in plain English should go ahead as long as it produces worthwhile improvements in understanding, and that in the longer term, primary tax legislation should be drafted in terms of general principles.

In this report the Tax Law Review Committee advocates a number of proposals for the thorough overhaul of the tax appeals system. The UK does not have a single system of tax appeals but a number of systems, the details of which differ according to the tax and there is a maze of provisions that can baffle taxpayers and practitioners alike which can affect access to the system and the cost of tax appeals.

The Green Budget looks at the Chancellor's options for the Budget.

This report analyses the changing economic positions of tenants in subsidised public housing. It shows how low their incomes are today, how these low incomes interact with higher rents and the housing benefit system to reduce their returns to work and looks at a number of reforms to the benefit system.

Work Related training is currently at the top of the political and public policy agenda. The report looks at who gets work related training in Britain, the effect it has on the subsequent employment prospects of men and women, the wage payoffs to different types of work related training, and whether it improves the wages prospects of relatively low skilled individuals.

This report of the 1993 IFS Residential Conference considers the administrative issues that face the tax system in the 1990s. Speakers dealt with the implications of the move to self-assessment, the adoption of a rulings procedure, tax appeals and general anti-avoidance rules. International aspects of tax administration and compliance were also considered.

Devolution and regional government are once again at the centre of policy debate in Britain. This reports considers the economic issues in designing a system of regional government, and its fiscal implications for the residents of the regions of Britain.

This report studies the demand for private health insurance in the UK using data from the British Social Attitudes Survey.

Is Britain a highly mobile society, or are affluence and poverty largely transmitted from one generation to the next? This report suggests that the economic standing of parents is an extremely important determinant of where their children end up in the income distribution.

In this Commentary, the authors look at the likely effects that real year-by-year increases in road fuel duties will have on the use of cars by households and on their economic welfare, with particular attention to the distributional consequences.

There has been much debate about legislative complexity and many people believe the situation is now so bad that something must be done - we cannot go on as we are. This report examines the scope for purposive legislation and clearer language and asks whether we need to rewrite our tax laws from scratch.

The Green Budget outlines the macroeconomic background, assesses the fiscal stance, and then considers a wide range of tax and spending issues that will be on the Chancellor's pre-budget agenda.

The national non-domestic rate was introduced in 1990 to replace a system of locally varying business rates which had lasted for almost four centuries. Five years after the. 1990 reforms, this report evaluates the operation of the present system and discusses various options for reform.

This study is based on a new data source, the BHPS, which allows researchers to follow the fortunes of the same households from one year to the next. It finds that the poorest tenth of households in 1992 were on average around 3% worse off in real terms than the poorest tenth in 1991, but that this result was mainly attributable to previously non-poor households becoming worse off.