Government finances and spending

This note provides details on the average losses among pensioner households from tax and benefit reforms that will be introduced between January 2011 and April 2014.

This Briefing Note analyses Universal Credit as set out in the government's White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works.

Immediately following the Spending Review of 20th October, the IFS updated its analysis of the distributional impact of tax and benefit reforms to be introduced between 2010-11 and 2014-15, taking into account the effects of the reforms announced in the Spending Review.2 This did not substantially alter the conclusions from previous analysis by IFS researchers that the impact of the tax and benefit reforms to be introduced over this period was decreasing as a proportion of income within the lowest 90% of households in the income distribution, although it is the very richest households that will lose the most overall. If we were instead to rank households by expenditure, which as we have argued previously might better reflect households' lifetime incomes, losses as a proportion of expenditure again fall as we move up the expenditure distribution

In this paper we look at how the tax and benefit system redistributed income and affected incentives to work in 2009-10, and at the effect of tax and benefit reforms between 1978-79 and 2009-10 on the level of inequality and work incentives.

Details of the proposed changes to higher education (HE) have been finalised ahead of tomorrow's vote in the House of Commons on the raising of the cap on tuition fees to £9,000. We offer an analysis in this Briefing Note.

The tax treatment of intellectual property is currently in the spotlight and there is considerable interest in understanding how taxes affect firms' choices over where to hold patents for tax purposes.