Government finances and spending

Government is a game of two halves — the spending half and the taxing half. If the latter isn’t pretty much as big as the former then in the long run we’ll be in trouble. To fund all the schools and hospitals, police and armed forces, roads and pensions, we pay more than £600bn in tax each year. That’s about £4 in every £10 generated by the economy.

This presentation was given at a workshop entitled 'European Public Finances Through the Financial Crisis' at the ZEW Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany.

This presentation was given at the CASE social exclusion seminar in June 2014.

In this article for the Daily Mail, Paul Johnson considers the efficacy of a flat tax to simplify the tax system.

The debate on Scottish independence has been enlivened today by the publication of two separate reports on the outlook for the public finances of an independent Scotland, one from HM Treasury and one from the Scottish Government. These reports come to quite different conclusions about the likely strength of Scotland’s public finances as an independent country compared to continuing as part of the UK. In this observation we discuss why today’s analysis from the Scottish Government appears to paint such a different picture for Scotland to that of our own previous work, and the work published today by HM Treasury.

This paper was presented at the Fiscal Rules Roundtable at the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 21 May 2014. This event formed part of a programme of work funded by the ESRC entitled "Combining micro- and macro- economic approaches to fiscal policy evaluation"

A blog published by the Economics of Higher Education network.

This presentation was given at the Society of Labor Economists Annual Conference, Washington DC, 3 May 2014.

This presentation was given in Uppsala in May 2014.

Last week the Prime Minister, David Cameron, stated that he would like to increase the inheritance tax threshold, reviving memories of the 2010 Conservative Party manifesto pledge to increase the threshold to £1 million. This observation sets out how much this would cost, who would benefit and sets out arguments for alternative reforms to inheritance tax.

This paper was given at the 2014 post Budget briefing on 20 March 2014.

This presentation was given at the IFS post-Budget briefing on 20 March 2014.

This presentation was delivered to BBC journalists in advance of the Budget 2014.