The Inland Revenue must derive a certain degree of satisfaction from the fact that it took the City the best part of a week to appreciate that one of the more obscure sections of the 1982 Finance Bill had overnight ended its favourite pastime of bed and breakfasting-a most skilful exercise in...

One of the most enduring legacies of the 1980s has been the programme of privatizations that the Thatcher government set in train in the first half of the decade. Whole sectors of the UK economy which were formerly part of the public sector were sold off to the private sector. Some were bought...

The last decade has witnessed the introduction of an elaborate system of regulation in the UK. Whole segments of British industry are now operating under the supervision of regulatory bodies not dissimilar to the government departments they were designed to replace. Regulation has been an...

In our article in the July 1980 issue of Fiscal Studies, we examined the impact of the growth of North Sea oil production on the domestic economy. A major conclusion of that article was that 'the contraction of manufacturing output, and an increase in domestic absorption on imported...

There are two reasons for concern about the effect fo the tax and benefit system on incentives for low paid workers. Because of tax and loss of entitlement to benefits, it is possible that a large increase in gross earnings has little effect on a worker's net income. This problem has been widely...

Local government finance has suddenly become the most acute fiscal problem of the early 1980's in Britain. In January 1982 the Institute for Fiscal Studies held a conference, to discuss the issues involved. The immediate occation was the publication by the Government of a Green Paper describing...

The first review of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme is currently in progress. We have argued elsewhere (Hemming and Kay, 1981b) that the review should involve a fundamental reappraisal of the structure of the scheme. In this paper we concentrate on a single issue, but one which is...