In 1997, the Labour Party was elected in the UK with few explicitly articulated ideas about social security reforms. This paper reviews the large number of subsequent reforms to social security, and argues that some consistent themes have emerged. A commitment to keep to the tight spending plans...

Microsimulation methods are used to identify the contribution of tax and benefit reforms to the significant growth in UK income inequality since 1979. The total effect turns out to depend crucially on the counterfactual against which the reforms are assessed: compared with the alternative of...

Building on previous work, this paper documents the changes in income inequality that have occurred over the past 20 years, right up until the late 1990s. In particular, we are interested in whether or not the path of inequality in the most recent economic cycle differed from that observed in...

British public investment has declined sharply both as a share of GDP and as a share of government spending since the 1970s. Only part of this decline is explained by privatisation, which transferred some public investment to the private sector. More important was the very large and permanent...

The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern. A primary reason for this concern has been the widely- drawn conclusion that the living standards of the very poorest have at best failed to keep pace with the living standards of the...

This article describes the changing patterns in income inequality and real living standards over the last 30 years. Whilst it is well documented that inequality has been rising since 1979,2 there is rather less information on how the pattern of inequality changed in the period up to 1979. This...

We evaluate the effects of undergoing any early education (before the compulsory starting age of 5) and of pre-school on a cohort of British children born in 1958. In contrast to most available studies, we are able to assess whether any effects on cognition and socialisation are long-lasting, as...