Government finances and spending

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the idea of citizenship that lies behind the Labour government's welfare reforms.

This paper uses a simple model of how households at different points on the income distribution make decisions about saving and labour supply to illustrate some of the problems government faces in designing social security systems.

This is the second part of the symposium arising from a one-day conference held at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in May 2002.

This paper discusses a theoretical framework to study the issues of competition and incentives without relying on the standard profit-oriented market model in the context of the debates about public service reform in the UK.

In the previous edition, we argued that governments might care about child poverty for reasons of equity and efficiency, and we introduced the concept of an equivalence scale as a way to help compare well-being across different sorts of households.

This paper provides new evidence on the substitutability between private and pension wealth by exploiting the Italian pension reform of 1992.

An additional 100,000 children were lifted out of poverty on the most commonly cited of the government's relative poverty measures between 2000ְ1 and 2001ְ2. The most recent figures show 3.8 million children (roughly 30 per cent of all children) in Britain in households with income below 60 per cent of the median income after housing costs. Although this means that almost one in three children in Britain live in poverty on this definition, this is the lowest level recorded since 1991. Since the Labour government came to power, the total drop in the numbers in child poverty has been around 500,000.

This paper argues that a common basis for government spending across the regions and territories of the UK will be more equitable and efficient, and may even depoliticise the financial framework of the UK.

The current Labour Government wants to reduce the level of child poverty in this country.

On 17 February 2003, one of the world's largest and most ambitious plans to tackle urban congestion began, with the introduction of a congestion charge for central London. It is hoped that this õ daily charge for many vehicles entering the Inner Ring Road charging zone will significantly reduce the level of congestion faced by those travelling into and out of central London both by private and by public transport. This Briefing Note aims to provide a guide to the workings of the London congestion charge.

Many health-care systems allocate funding according to measures of need. The utilisation approach for measuring need rests on the assumptions that use of health care is determined by demand and supply and that need is an important element of demand.

The Education Maintenance Allowance: Third Year Report