While the UK’s exit from the European Union continues to dominate the political and economic landscape, another important process looms: the 2019 Spending Review. This will determine how government spending is to be distributed across departments beyond 2019–20, including spending on overseas aid.
The UK's lowest-paid workers are about to get a pay rise - the result of an increase in the minimum wage on Monday.Since it was introduced in 1999, the minimum wage has risen much faster than average pay. The government is considering what to do after 2020 and further rises are possible.
Almost six years since council tax support was localised, research into the design and effects of local schemes reveals three key insights. This article first appeared in Benefit magazine and is reproduced here with full permission.
Paying benefits to people of working age is a big part of what the government does.In fact, it spends more on these benefits than it does on education or national defence and policing. They account for roughly £1 in every £8 the government spends, or about £100bn a year. This is on top of the £120bn that is spent on benefits for pensioners. A look at the size of the bill and who gets these benefits reveals big changes over time.
In an influential paper, Deaton and Paxson (1998) raise an important puzzle inunderstanding returns to scale in household consumption. They note that, holding percapita resources constant, returns to scale (in at least some goods) imply that larger households are better off, and so should consume more of private goods such as food. However, they document in a range of data sets that larger households have lower per capita food expenditures (holding per capita resources constant).
Each year, the UK experiences excess winter mortality (EWM). In 2014/2015, the number of excess winter deaths in England and Wales was estimated at 43,900, the highest level since 1999.
Consumption Euler equations are important tools in empirical macroeconomics. When estimated on micro data, they are typically linearized, so standard IV or GMM methods can be employed to deal with the measurement error that is endemic to survey data. However, linearization, in turn, may induce serious approximation bias.
The paper deals with panel co-operation in a cross-national, fully harmonized face to-face survey. Our outcome of interest is panel co-operation in the fourth wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe.
In recent years there has been renewed interest in the question of whether additional taxes should be devolved to English local government. This report considers the options and issues.
The government has launched a consultation on whether to ban the advertising of food and drink high in fat, salt or sugar on television before the 9pm watershed. But the impact of such restrictions would depend on how firms change their advertising strategies following the ban.
Today, about 1.6 million employees aged 25 and over are paid exactly at the living wage of £7.83 an hour. That's more than three times as many as were on the minimum wage in the early 2000s, soon after it was introduced.
