Reports

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.

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.

Much of the debate over inequality in the UK has focused on household incomes. This study provides details of trends in household spending levels. It finds that the inequality of household expenditures has risen much more slowly over the 1980s than the inequality of household incomes.

This report looks at some of the economic issues surrounding the current system of alcohol taxes in the UK and considers how far current taxes on alcohol are sustainable as European integration proceeds.

This report considers the issues involved in using sales taxes as a possible source of local government revenues in the UK.

This Green Budget looks at the options available to the Chancellor in his November Budget.

The gap between those who earn the most and those who earn the least in the UK is growing rapidly and in 1992 was larger than it had been at any time this century. It is one of the major factors underlying the rise in the inequality of household income and in poverty levels. This, together with its implications about the way the labour market is changing, makes it one of the most important issues facing policymakers today.

This report provides, for the first time ever, a consistently defined picture of living standards in the UK over the last three decades. Looking in detail at patterns in income inequality, and at the changing fortunes of the richest and the poorest, this report puts the trends of the 1980s into the context of 30 years.

This book aims to unravel the complexities of pension policy and provide answers or suggest alternative options to the major issues facing policymakers.

This report analyses the distributional effects of the tax changes announced in the two Budgets of 1993 and how the tax changes since the mid 1980s have changed the whole way in which the tax system works and affects individuals.

The taxation of savings in the UK is in a mess and the IFS Capital Taxes Group, set up in 1987 and chaired by Malcolm Gammie of Linklaters & Paines, makes proposals which would considerably simplify the system. Its two principal proposals, which are outlined in this report, are for an extension of the current PEP and TESSA regimes to all personal savings and the introduction of an allowance for the cost of equity finance.

Very little is known about how households hold their savings, if they have any at all. This study shows how the amount and nature of household saving and wealth vary across different household types.

Measures of average inflation like the RPI cannot, by definition, capture the true cost-of-living increases faced by individual households. This report looks at the extent to which a range of households have had different experiences of inflation over the last 15 years.

This Green Budget looks at the options available to the Chancellor in his March Budget.