Taxes and benefits

The government has a target for child poverty to fall to 3.1 million by 2004-05, measured by the number of children in households with less than 60% median income after housing costs. The latest data showed that 3.8 million children (30% of children in Britain) were in poverty in 2001-02 on this definition. To help achieve the target, increases to means-tested benefits and tax credits need to take effect in April 2004, and therefore need to be announced in the forthcoming Pre-Budget Report.

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.

Regression, matching, control function and instrumental variables methods for recovering the impact of education on individual earnings are reviewed for single treatment and sequential multiple treatments with and without heterogeneous returns.

On 6 October 2003, the pension credit replaced the minimum income guarantee as the principal means-tested benefit for families containing an individual aged 60 or over. This Briefing Note examines the impact of this reform.

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

How and whether judges should be held accountable is a key issue in the design of a legal system.

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.

In this paper we discuss the issues involved with the evaluation of social interventions and with the attempts at 'scaling them up'.

In this paper we discuss the issues involved with the evaluation of social interventions and with the attempts at 'scaling them up'.

This paper presents evidence on the relationship between shocks torelative male wages, and changes in household consumption in Mexico during the1990s decade, which is a period characterized by high volatility.

We investigate the effects of the drastic tariff reductions of the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia onthe wage distribution.

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.

The child tax credit and working tax credit were introduced in April 2003. When fully operational, the child tax credit will represent the majority of government financial support for children. It is designed to simplify the system of financial support for parents, and provides support that is means-tested against family income. The working tax credit is designed to make work more financially attractive. It means that people with or without children in work and on a low income may receive extra help from the State. This Briefing Note looks at the changes that have been made and asks why the new tax credits have been introduced, how they work, the cost and distributional impact, the impact on work incentives and what levels of take-up we might expect.

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

This briefing note is provided as evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee as to whether childcare could be provided for all parents who need it to help them to work. It looks at the ways in which this could be achieved.

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.

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