This paper explores the short-term financial implications of abolishing earnings replacement social security benefits and relying on the system of means tested benefits to replace them.

In seeking to understand the factors that lead to non-take-up of means-tested benefits it is important to identify the potential gains from claiming and the possible barriers to making a claim. Generally, the benefit of claiming is considered to be the cash entitlement. The barriers are lack of...

Traditionally, Budget analysis consists of calculation of the "overnight" effects on particular families. Our analysis departs from this by using survey data, representative of the actual population, which allows us to assess the overall distributional effects. We capture the diverse range of...

The new Labour Government in Britain has made the reduction of child poverty one of its central objectives. An earlier paper described the specific initiatives involved in Labourís approach and weighed them up in terms of their potential impact (Piachaud and Sutherland, 2000). This paper -...

The differential impact of comparable Basic Income (BI) schemes is examined for two countries by Callan et al (1996). This study uses national tax-benefit microsimulation models for Ireland (SWITCH) and the UK (POLIMOD). It finds that the relative effect of a scheme depends on the way in which...

Micro- level information on both expenditure and income is useful for a wide range of purposes: to conduct investigations into standards of living, for example. It is necessary for the analysis of the combined effects of direct and indirect personal taxes. However, it is unusual to have one data...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of maintaining and updating POLIMOD. It is mainly intended as a reference document, internal to the Microsimulation Unit. However, it may be of wider interest (a) as background information for POLIMOD users or (b) as a guide to all the...

One of the Gordon Brown's keywords as Chancellor over the last two years has been fairness. In this paper we examine the impact of the recent budget and the two previous budgets on the distribution of household incomes in the country as a whole. We ask the following questions: - Have Labourís...

In his Budget speech on 26 November 1996, the Chancellor of the Exchequer claimed he was not going to be a Santa Claus, nor was he going to be a Scrooge. In this paper we examine the extent to which these claims are true by looking at the distributional impact of some of the personal tax...

In this paper we focus on a particular data requirement of tax-benefit microsimulation models in the UK: micro-data on both incomes and expenditures. Tax-benefit models estimate the revenue and distributional effects of changes in personal tax and social security policy. They require detailed...