This paper examines the potential role for increasing social welfare rates, along with tax credits and bands, in line with price or wage inflation - a process known as indexation. Ireland currently has a default policy of no increases in line with inflation, with ad hoc changes instead announced...

COVID-19 had, and continues to have, a strong negative effect on incomes in Ireland due to widespread job losses as the measures put in place to slow the spread of the disease resulted in severe economic restrictions. Despite the existence of unemployment supports, additional income supports...

This paper examines how changes to the social welfare system for lone parents, such as the tightening of eligibility criteria for One-Parent Family Payment and the introduction of Jobseeker's Transitional Payment, affected lone-parent incomes and work incentives. Our main contributions are...

The Yearly Average Method used in calculating State Contributory Pension entitlements has been criticised for creating anomalies, particularly for women. It has been announced that from 2034 onwards, entitlements will be based fully on the new Total Contributions Approach. This paper examines...

Trade-offs exist in protecting those on lower incomes and ensuring an adequate incentive to work. If benefit entitlements and other supports are withdrawn sharply as income rises, there may be a financial disincentive to enter employment or to work more. The same is true for tax and social...

Over the past 30 years, there have been periods of boom and bust, but average household incomes have grown strongly in Ireland. The distribution of household income has been broadly stable over this period, so that there has been substantial growth for low-, middle- and high-income households....

This paper simulates the impact that Covid-19 related job losses will have on family incomes and the public finances. It finds that in the central 'medium' unemployment scenario of 600,000 job losses, around 400,000 families will see their disposable income fall by more than 20 per cent in the...

Using micro data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Household Budget Survey (HBS), we assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumption and its implications for indirect tax receipts in 2020. We show that over one-third of household expenditure is on items that are currently...

Demographic change is putting pressure on the sustainability of State Pension systems in many developed countries. In Ireland, there have been recent calls to reform the system of contributions and/or increase the State Pension age in order to avoid significant shortfalls in the Social Insurance...

A series of studies have found that, prior to the introduction of the National Childcare Scheme (NCS), parents in Ireland faced some of the highest childcare costs among OECD countries. To improve childcare affordability, in 2019 the Government introduced the NCS, which awards universal and...