This note updates and revises the estimates provided in Sutherland, Sefton and Piachaud (2003) (SSP henceforth) of the likely reduction in poverty rates by 2004-5 - the Government's target year for reducing child poverty by one quarter - and of the impact of policy changes since 1997 on poverty.

In seeking to understand the factors that lead to non-take-up of means-tested benefits it is important to identify the potential gains from claiming and the possible barriers to making a claim. Generally, the benefit of claiming is considered to be the cash entitlement. The barriers are lack of...

The non take-up of means-tested benefits by pensioners has been of concern in the UK for some time. It will become all the more important to measure and to understand with the introduction of the means-tested Pension Credit in October 2003, to which about half of all pensioners are expected to...

Micro- level information on both expenditure and income is useful for a wide range of purposes: to conduct investigations into standards of living, for example. It is necessary for the analysis of the combined effects of direct and indirect personal taxes. However, it is unusual to have one data...

This short paper updates the material presented in Microsimulation Research Notes 35 and 36 on the impact of Budget changes on incomes in general and child poverty rates in particular. It takes account of all the main policy changes to be introduced by the Labour government of 1997-2001. The...

In this paper we focus on a particular data requirement of tax-benefit microsimulation models in the UK: micro-data on both incomes and expenditures. Tax-benefit models estimate the revenue and distributional effects of changes in personal tax and social security policy. They require detailed...