Measuring growth with ordered categorical variables is problematic due to their lack of cardinal measure and the equivocation and ambiguity inherent in the arbitrary attribution of cardinal scale to ordinal variates. Here, noting that the mean in a cardinal paradigm is the cumulation over its...

Individuals in the UK with health conditions may be entitled to two types of benefits - incapacity benefits (for those whose condition prevents them from working) and disability benefits (to help with extra living costs arising from the disability). Since the onset of the pandemic, there has...

In this report, we examine the career progression of nurses and other staff groups within the NHS Agenda for Change (AfC) pay framework in England over the decade between 2012 and 2021. We document differences in progression across pay bands between staff groups and within groups of nurses to...

In this report, we use administrative payroll data from the Electronic Staff Record, combined with local earnings data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for the period between 2014 and 2019, to examine the correlation between leaving rates for certain NHS staff groups and measures of...

This report uses data on food and non-alcoholic drink purchases from shops, takeaways, restaurants and other outlets to analyse how the diets of a large, representative panel of households in Great Britain evolved 15 months before and up to 24 months after the start of the onset of the COVID-19...

Health spending, and the performance of the NHS, will feature prominently in the upcoming general election campaign. Many different factors matter for NHS performance and for the wider health of the population, but one important factor is the level of spending on health services. In this IFS...

Five years ago, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson made "levelling up" a central plank of the Conservative Party's bid for re-election, with a manifesto pledge to "level up every part of the UK". In 2022, the government published a thorough and ambitious White Paper setting out 12 levelling up...

The introduction of universal credit (UC) has been the most significant reform to the workingage benefits system since the reforms following the post-war Beveridge Report. When fully rolled out, around 8 million families - 29% of all working-age families - will be entitled to the benefit. UC is...

The past 14 years have witnessed an enormous amount of reform to the tax and benefit system. While it is tempting for politicians to draw attention to one set of reforms or another, what matters for household incomes is the whole system. In this report, we study the impact of policy changes to...