This document is intended as a practical guide for researchers using the Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) method of clustering data. The purpose of the guide is to highlight facets of GCA that are not immediately apparent or covered in other publications, and to ensure that all aspects of GCA...

Traditionally, Budget analysis consists of calculation of the "overnight" effects on particular families. Our analysis departs from this by using survey data, representative of the actual population, which allows us to assess the overall distributional effects. We capture the diverse range of...

The new Labour Government in Britain has made the reduction of child poverty one of its central objectives. An earlier paper described the specific initiatives involved in Labourís approach and weighed them up in terms of their potential impact (Piachaud and Sutherland, 2000). This paper -...

This paper explores the short-term financial implications of abolishing earnings replacement social security benefits and relying on the system of means tested benefits to replace them.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of maintaining and updating POLIMOD. It is mainly intended as a reference document, internal to the Microsimulation Unit. However, it may be of wider interest (a) as background information for POLIMOD users or (b) as a guide to all the...

One of the Gordon Brown's keywords as Chancellor over the last two years has been fairness. In this paper we examine the impact of the recent budget and the two previous budgets on the distribution of household incomes in the country as a whole. We ask the following questions: - Have Labourís...

Proposals for reforming the current system of taxes and transfers with a basic income and flat tax have received considerable attention in recent years in the UK and Ireland. Microsimulation models have played a central role in the formulation, the assessment, and the reformulation of these...

This research note describes the three national modules used in Eur3, a prototype three country microsimulation model covering France, Italy and the United Kingdom. This prototype was part of a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of constructing a large scale 15 country model for...

Static microsimulation models like POLIMOD are designed to assess the effects of current or prospective tax and benefit reforms. Since the purpose of POLIMOD is to inform policy, the accuracy of the model ouput is a key concern. Thus, a significant problem faced in the construction of such...

This paper describes how the 1994/95 and the 1995/96 Family Expenditure Survey (FES) were used to produce one of the four datasets that act as microdata input for POLIMOD, the dataset containing information on household expenditure. The other three datasets produced from the FES and used as...