This paper develops a typology of welfare services and attempts toillustrate its use in clarifying discussions about the privatisation ofwelfare and in analysing changes in expenditure. A third dimension,which concerns the extent of the consumer’s decision-making power andturns on the question...

The government’s pensions Green Paper – A new contract for welfare:partnership in pensions – proposes fundamental changes to the UK’sretirement income system. Members of CASE and of the Department ofSocial Policy at LSE have looked at the likely implications of the reformsfor pensioner...

At the start of the long wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the taxes available to the British state fell mainly on outlays made by its citizens, upon domestically produced commodities and services. Smaller proportions came from import duties and direct taxes upon their incomes...

By using official time series of the Italian evaded VAT base (Ministry of Finance) for the period 1980-2004 we investigate empirically the long-run characteristics of tax evasion and the relationship with the tax burden. We focus on three important issues not analyzed so far[...]

The aim of this paper is to compare empirically the effects of transport cost reductions due to infrastructure investments, emerging under different market structures. To this end, a computable spatial general equilibrium model with costly interregional trade is presented, which is calibrated...

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number ofpeople living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to beunacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting oftargets for particular indicators. The targets suggested...

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act(PRWORA) of 1996 represents a dramatic change in the US welfare state.One of its key goals was to move lone mothers, even those with youngchildren, from welfare to work. Early evidence suggests that, in concertwith a strong...

Economic evaluation has an important role in helping to make decisionsabout the use of scarce resources in an explicit and rational manner, yeteconomic evaluation is not well-developed in many areas of socialwelfare. This paper looks at the reasons for this, focusing on whateconomists could do...

This paper attempts to clarify the significance of reforms to disabilitybenefits proposed by the New Labour government in 1998, by settingthem in the context of the development of disability benefits since theearly 1970s. The first section charts the creation, extension andsubsequent series of...

This paper analyses the proposals contained in the Government GreenPaper, A New Contract for Welfare: Partnership in Pensions for low paidworkers and the potential of the new rules to guarantee a decent incomein old age. It discusses the general principles inherent in the design ofthe British...