Government finances and spending

The Government's plans for reforming Higher Education (HE) funding have been a source of great controversy. Much of this controversy has been focused on what the reforms will mean for students from different family income backgrounds, and on the levels of debt they may need to incur to go to higher education. Concern has also been raised about how graduates will be affected by these debt repayments throughout their working lives, as well as whether or not the funds raised will improve the situation of universities significantly. This Briefing Note addresses these issues, as well as describing the evolution of the proposed reforms to Higher Education funding in recent months. In doing this, we set out and explain the system which is most likely to be implemented if the HE Bill is passed, and discuss the ways in which students, graduates, and universities are likely to be affected. We also consider the possible effects on the taxpayer.

This note outlines the preliminary findings of the evaluation of a welfare programme in Colombia, Familias en Accíon. The programme aims to foster nutritional and educational development for the children of poor families in rural and urban communities, and the evaluation will use data collected from treatment and control areas to discover what methods are effective and how they work. In this note, we describe what the data show about the population and what the preliminary findings indicate about the efficacy of the programme.

This paper summarises the economic literature on modelling take-up, with a focus on income-related or work-related benefits or tax credits.

This Briefing Note provides an overview of public spending in the UK. It describes the components of public spending and examines trends in expenditure.

Many people in the UK do not claim benefits to which they seem to be entitled. Amongst those of working-age, take-up rates for Family Credit.

We produce projections of state and private long-term care expenditure and analyse the distributional impact of state-financed care, through innovative linking of macro- and micro-simulation models.

This paper examines the corporation tax forecasting techniques used by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

In August 2003 the government issued a further consultation document on reform to the corporation tax system.This consultation continues a process that started in July 2001 with a consultation document on large business taxation, and which appears to have become an annual exercise. This Briefing Note points out that this annual round of reform proposals does little to promote a stable environment for business investment decisions. New proposals on transfer pricing and finance leasing will add to business costs.

This report contains a summary of quantitative evidence from an evaluation of the Education

This paper contributes to the debate on investment in transport infrastructure and the allocation of public funds between road and railway projects.

The paper analyses the long-run empirical relationship between per capita economic growth, capital formation and total factor productivity growth, and fiscal decentralisation for the high-income OECD countries.

The fiscal and distributive impacts of three reforms to the social security pension system in the UK are evaluated.

In this commentary, IFS compares the reforms proposed by the two parties, looking at the effect on student and graduate finances, the distributional impact on households with different incomes, and the cost to the Exchequer and taxpayers in general.