Local government finance in England in the 2010s can be characterised by two major trends: large (albeit varying) cuts to council budgets; and a shift from centralised redistribution of funding towards a greater emphasis on fiscal incentives for revenue growth, most notably via the introduction...

The aim of this report, the IFS's first in-depth analysis of the Scottish Government Budget, is to look at some of the key implications for the coming year, and for the longer term. We do not attempt to cover all of the different services that the Scottish Government is responsible for, or all...

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks at Scottish tax policy and revenue, the overall amount of funding available for Scottish public services, and planned spending on different individual services in the coming financial year, 2024-25. In several important respects, the Scottish...

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks beyond 2024-25 to the medium-term outlook for the Scottish Government's funding, and the implications of the funding picture for the choices and trade-offs faced when allocating funding between areas of the budget. The Scottish Government had...

This report shows the extent to which low pay and unemployment are related, the effects of periods out of work on future earnings and the degree to which low pay is a persistent phenomenon. Importantly it demonstrates the way in which a minimum wage might affect a much higher proportion of the...

This report sets out what has happened to income and expenditure inequality in the 1990s and early 2000s, comparing the changes to previous decades. Although income is very often used for assessing living standards in this country, spending is often more informative, because many people can...

Official data on the distribution of household incomes in the UK are available only with a significant lag: the latest statistics are for 2013-14. In this report, we use modelling techniques to provide a more up-to-date picture and to assess how things are likely to evolve in the coming years....

The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. We assess the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014-15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years. The...

How have household incomes evolved since the onset of the financial crisis? How has the gap between rich and poor changed? How have living standards changed over time for different parts of the population? How many people are in poverty and which groups are most likely to face poverty? Each...

Inheritances have been growing as a share of national income in the UK since the 1970s. This trend looks set to continue as generations at older ages hold more wealth than their immediate predecessors but younger generations have no higher incomes than the generations born just before them. What...