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Showing 641 – 660 of 2007 results

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Placing faith in the pilots

Comment

In a new Municipal Journal article, David Phillips and Neil Amin-Smith discuss what the government might be hoping for from its business rates retention pilots and analyse the financial implications of the pilots for both pilot and non-pilot councils.

17 April 2018

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The first Spring Statement: no surprises sprung?

Comment

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.

9 March 2018

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Downgrade to the growth forecast has wide-ranging consequences

Comment

When a Chancellor delivers his Budget, the question people naturally ask is ‘why does this matter for me’. Often that means looking out for the newly announced tax and spending measures. For some, the policy measures announced in November – for example the removal of Stamp Duty for most first time house buyers, or another year of fuel duties being frozen in cash terms – will be fairly significant.

12 December 2017

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Beyond Business Rates?

Comment

With a national roll out of 100 per cent business rates retention unlikely in the next few years, David Phillips from the Institute for Fiscal Studies asks if it is worth looking to the longer term and more radical tax devolution.

11 December 2017

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Testing for a debt-threshold effect on output growth

Journal article

Using the Reinhart–Rogoff dataset, we find a debt threshold not around 90 per cent but around 30 per cent, above which the median real gross domestic product (GDP) growth falls abruptly.

11 December 2017

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TAXBEN: The IFS tax and benefit microsimulation model

Resource

TAXBEN is the IFS’s tax and benefit microsimulation model, which calculates the impact of tax and benefit policy on households. It is used heavily in IFS’s work on the impacts of tax and benefit policy. This document gives a high level summary of TAXBEN, covering what policies and effects it does and does not include, and its limitations.

15 November 2017

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Is our tax system fair? It depends...

Comment

The basic question of whether our tax system is fair is at the heart of many of our public debates. Discussions of whether ‘the rich’ or companies are paying their ‘fair share’ is regularly in, or underlying, the news headlines. These are important questions. If we want to ensure that we can raise the revenues to pay for the public goods and services that we all want, we need to be able to have sensible debates about how much tax we raise, who we raise it from and how we spend it.

3 November 2017

Publication graphic

Autumn 2017 Budget: options for easing the squeeze

Report

The key backdrop to all fiscal events in the UK since the financial crisis has been the weak performance of the economy. At the time of the March 2017 Budget, national income per adult was around 15% lower than it would have been had output per adult instead grown by 2% a year (close to the post-war average) since the start of 2008. Despite this historically poor performance, weak growth was forecast to continue. The March forecast implied that, by 2022, national income per capita would be 18% lower than it would have been if it had grown at 2% per year since 2008. That is astonishing.

30 October 2017