Taxes and benefits

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.

In this paper, we discuss the ways in which food markets might fail to deliver the optimal outcome and how this may justify government intervention.

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.

IFS analysis shows that the coalition Government's tax increases and welfare cuts are hitting Londoners harder, on average, than households across the UK as a whole.

This paper lays out the methodological issues involved in finding the distributional impact of the tax changes in Mexica and describes the approach the authors will take in their analysis.