Living standards

Building on previous work, this paper documents the changes in income inequality that have occurred over the past 20 years, right up until the late 1990s.

Significant change was made to both tax and benefits systems during the period 19972001.

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century.

The first half of the report sheds some new light on the following questions with a detailed and consistent comparison of income distributions in Western Germany and the UK from 1984 to 1992. To what extent was the income distribution in Western Germany similar to the UK in 1984? Did the inequality of West German incomes rise to the same extent? What was the differing role of the labour market, the tax and benefit system and demographic change in each country? The second half of the report concentrates on whether and how education, training and wage setting systems together with other institutional factors in Western Germany can explain the differences relative to the more deregulated UK labour market.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting. It highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality.

This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages.

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.

Methods of testing econometrically for horizontal inequity (HI) induced by tax systems are examined.

This report shows the extent to which low pay and unemployment are related, the effects of periods out of work on future earnings and the degree to which low pay is a persistent phenomenon. Importantly it demonstrates the way in which a minimum wage might affect a much higher proportion of the population than is generally appreciated because of the way in which people move in and out of low paid work. A chapter of the report is also given over to the effects of work experience and job tenure on pay levels.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.

One-and-a-half million pensioners are dependent on the minimum means-tested benefit, income support.

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners.

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.

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.

Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.

The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.

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.