Tuesday’s Spring Statement may not contain any new policy measures, but it will contain the latest official economic and fiscal forecasts. These are likely to be for lower borrowing over the next five years than forecast in November. But that shouldn’t be great cause for celebration. The deficit will still be forecast to be much greater than thought just two years ago. Meeting the Government’s commitment to eliminate the deficit by the mid-2020s will remain extremely tough.
Collective models identifying resource shares are promising tools to analyze intra-household welfare and poverty. However, their empirical application has proven difficult in practice as authors contend with large standard errors and unstable estimates. This paper uses a prominent framework to show how a common feature of the structure of these models makes the task so difficult and proposes an empirical strategy to stabilize the estimates.
Medicaid is a government programme that also provides health insurance to the elderly who have few assets and either low income or catastrophic health care expenses. We ask how the Medicaid rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency, and we ask what other observable characteristics are important to determine who ends up on Medicaid.
This presentation was given at an event on 6 March held to present the highlights from a programme of IFS research, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, on poverty and low income.
The nature of low income in the UK has changed radically. The problem of low pay for those in work is increasingly dominating the domestic policy agenda. To mark the end of a programme of research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we are setting out and discussing the latest evidence on poverty in the UK and in particular the challenges posed by the rise of in-work poverty. This observation summarises the key points.
Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have obtained the right to raise revenues locally to supplement central government grants in order to fund their activities.
We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a fi nite data set of price and demand observations to be consistent with an additively separable preference.
The UK has over 1100 tax reliefs and according to HMRC, we forego over £400bn of revenue each year as a result of reliefs. In this observation, Helen Miller, Associate Director at IFS, sets out some of the issues.
We develop an approach to valuing non-market goods using nonparametric revealed preference analysis. We show how nonparametric methods can also be used to bound the welfare effects of changes in the provision of a non-market good.
