Government finances and spending

While there is still much uncertainty, we now project Scotland’s budget deficit in 2020–21 to have spiked at between 22% and 25% of national income, up from 8.6% of national income in 2019–20, although less than our previous projection. It is also still higher than a forecast deficit of 16% of national income for the UK as a whole for the same year.

For the first time, and co-funded by the Scottish Policy Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a range of Scottish Election Briefing Notes on tax, benefits and public spending, and the parties plans for the coming parliamentary term. We presented the main findings of our analysis ahead of the election at a live webinar, in partnership with the University of Glasgow.

This morning the ONS published its first estimates of the public finances over the whole of the financial year 2020-21. Borrowing is estimated to have reached £303 billion, or 14.5% of national income. This is £52 billion less than the £355 billion forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility at the Budget in early March. However, it is a staggering £248 billion, or 12.1% of national income, higher than forecast just before the financial year began – and more to the point, just prior to the economic impact of Covid-19 started to be felt in the UK – in March 2020.

Scottish Labour set out a vision for big expansion of the welfare state - with no sense of how much this would eventually cost or how it would be paid for

The Scottish Conservatives offer extra spending on the NHS and a range of targeted measures – but an ambition to cut income tax looks unlikely to be realised without cuts to at least some services.

The SNP’s manifesto offers big gains to a number of targeted groups in Scotland - but would involve difficult trade-offs in a tight budgetary environment.

How is Scotland's higher spending allocated across different services? How have these allocations changed over time? And how do a range of headline in

Presented "The Liquidity Sensitivity of Healthcare Consumption: Evidence from Social Security Payments" at Johannes Kepler University Linz.

The COVID-19 crisis has both created billions of pounds of new costs for and demands on councils’ budgets and has hit many of their sources of income. We find that across the sector as a whole, the government has largely addressed forecast pressures in 2020-21. However, financial pressures have been, and will continue to be, uneven across councils. As a result, underlying the aggregate picture, many councils still face at least some shortfall this year – particularly among shire districts.

It’s easy enough to see the politics behind Rishi Sunak’s tax increase of choice. Opaque, in the future, jam today, well-hidden pain tomorrow. The scale of the increase, though, makes the economics more concerning. Not only is he unlikely to get as much revenue as he’s banking on, he risks reducing investment levels and hence wages and living standards over the long run.

IFS researchers presented their initial analysis of the Chancellor's announcements on the public finances, spending on public services, and the tax and the benefit system on Thursday 4 March at an online briefing.

The tax system discourages employment, investment and risk-taking. It needs reform, say Stuart Adam and Helen Miller.