The government’s overhaul of the direct tax system, including the 1984 reforms to the Corporation Tax, the introduction of Independent Taxation and in 1993, the introduction of ‘pay and file’ for companies, has so far left the taxation of the self-employed relatively untouched. Despite...

At first sight, the technicalities of social securtiy benefit indexation are a somewhat abstruse topic, suitable only for the journals and handbooks of tax and finance practitioners. Yet the nature of benefit indexation systems has major implications both for trends in the living standards of...

This paper examines the tax treatment of pensioners in 15 industrialised countries. Using a standard methodology, it calculates the average and marginal tax rates of older people and compares them with those of people of working age. These are then combined with a model of pension entitlements...

From April 1988, individuals were offered a new pensions option by the Government: the possibility of 'contracting out' of the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) into an Approved Personal Pension. In a personal pension scheme, an individual accumulates his or her pension contributions...

The then Chancellor announced in his Budget Speech in 1989 that the 'earnings rule' for pensioners, which had been introduced in 1948, would be abolished from 1 October 1989. The rule reduced entitlements to the state pension if earnings were above a certain level. At the same time, the...