This Briefing Note looks at the potential for the introduction of a 'fat tax' into the UK in an effort to reduce the growing prevalence of obesity in Britain. This Briefing Note looks at trends in UK obesity and examines evidence on eating habits and exercise in order to see whether trends here can account for what we see happening to obesity. We go on to review some of the key economic reasons behind why we might be concerned about obesity and why we might consider there to be a case for government intervention. We also discuss how food is currently taxed and the various ways in which a 'fat tax' might be introduced, looking at particular issues the government might need to address should it wish to introduce one. We finish by presenting some simple analysis of a hypothetical 'fat tax' in terms of how it might impact differently on the rich and the poor.
This note outlines the preliminary findings of the evaluation of a welfare programme in Colombia, Familias en Accíon. The programme aims to foster nutritional and educational development for the children of poor families in rural and urban communities, and the evaluation will use data collected from treatment and control areas to discover what methods are effective and how they work. In this note, we describe what the data show about the population and what the preliminary findings indicate about the efficacy of the programme.
This Briefing Note provides an overview of public spending in the UK. It describes the components of public spending and examines trends in expenditure.
We produce projections of state and private long-term care expenditure and analyse the distributional impact of state-financed care, through innovative linking of macro- and micro-simulation models.
Many health-care systems allocate funding according to measures of need. The utilisation approach for measuring need rests on the assumptions that use of health care is determined by demand and supply and that need is an important element of demand.
The paper presents two taxonomies for classifying global and transnational health-promoting activities according to three parameters of publicness -non-rivalry of benefits, non-excludability of non-payers and the aggregation technologies.
