This paper takes as its starting point Henry Neuburger's injunction that taxation must be seen as a contribution to the maintenance of the welfare state, not as a dead-weight burden. It sets recent developments in the UK tax ratio in the context of changes in public spending, particularly on...

Britain is an unequal country, more so than many other industrial countries and more so than a generation ago. This is manifest in many ways - most obviously in the gap between those who are well off and those who are less well off. But inequalities in people's economic positions are also...

That Britain became more unequal in the last quarter century is well known; the scale of change, less so.At the end of the 1970s, the richest tenth received 21 per cent of total disposable income. This rose to 28-29per cent by 2002-03, as much as the whole of the bottom half. More than half of...

This paper takes as its starting point Henry Neuburger's injunction that taxation must be seen as a contribution to the maintenance of the welfare state, not as a dead-weight burden. It sets recent developments in the UK tax ratio in the context of changes in public spending, particularly on...

I examine the idea of 'the long run' in Piketty (2014) and related works. In contrast to simplistic interpretations of long-run models of income- and wealth-distribution Piketty (2014) draws on a rich economic analysis that models the intra- and inter-generational processes that underlie the...

It is well established that on average disabled people and the households in which they live face greater financial disadvantage in terms of income than their counterparts. What is less well understood is how they fare in terms of their wealth status. In this paper we use data from two large...

Despite prolonged economic growth, poverty has become a more notable and noted feature of Chinese society. The paper examines three phases of development since the foundation of the People's Republic: the central planning era (1949 -1978); the pro-urban growth model (1978 - 1999); and more...