Poverty

This Commentary presents a detailed analysis of the latest figures and recent trends.

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 paper describes the analysis underlying a review of means testing for civil legal aid in England and Wales, to achieve considerable simplification without sacrificing fairness.

This paper analyses the individual taxes as well as the combination of all these taxes and duties related to environmental concerns, including taxes on heating, transport fuels, electricity, water, waste, plastic bags, registration of cars, annual car use and pesticides.

The government has a target for child poverty to fall to 3.1 million by 2004-05, measured by the number of children in households with less than 60% median income after housing costs. The latest data showed that 3.8 million children (30% of children in Britain) were in poverty in 2001-02 on this definition. To help achieve the target, increases to means-tested benefits and tax credits need to take effect in April 2004, and therefore need to be announced in the forthcoming Pre-Budget Report.

How do we determine how "well-off" a nation is?

This paper measures the distortionary and distributional effects of housing subsidies in the Netherlands.

In addition to having much-publicised targets for child poverty, the current government has also set itself the equally ambitious goal ‘to end pensioner poverty in our country’ .

There is a strong consensus that the British general election successes of the Labour Party in 1997 and 2001 owed much to attracting and retaining support from amongst the 'middle-class' voters of 'middle Britain'. But are the supposed residents of middle Britain in the middle of the income distribution? In this briefing note, we look at where we might find the 'middle classes' in the income distribution, and at the pattern of income distribution more generally.

We examine the effect on inequality of increasing one income, and show that for two wide classes of indices a benchmark income level or position exists, dividing upper from lower incomes, such that if a lower income is raised, inequality falls, and if an upper income is raised, inequality rises.

We investigate the effects of the drastic tariff reductions of the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia onthe wage distribution.

Child poverty in Britain fell in Labour's first term, though by much less than micro-simulation exercises suggested.

In this paper we discuss the issues involved with the evaluation of social interventions and with the attempts at 'scaling them up'.

In this paper we discuss the issues involved with the evaluation of social interventions and with the attempts at 'scaling them up'.

Thepaper studies land-market adjustment in the wake of Vietnam's reforms aiming toestablish a free market in land-use rights following de-collectivization.

We assess the realized land allocation against explicit counter-factuals, including theallocation implied by a competitive market-based privatization.