The distributional impact of public spending in the UK

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) were made available through the UK Data Archive (UKDA). ELSA was developed by a team of researchers based at the National Centre for Social Research, University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The data were collected by the National Centre for Social Research. The funding is provided by the National Institute of Aging in the United States, and a consortium of UK government departments co-ordinated by the Office for National Statistics. The Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS) is produced by the Office for National Statistics and was supplied by the ESRC data archive. Data from the National Travel Survey were collected by the Office for National Statistics for the Department for Transport and were supplied by the ESRC Data Archive. Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's printer for Scotland. All errors are our own. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may† Institute for Fiscal Studies. ‡ University College London and Institute for Fiscal Studies. The Distributional Impact of Public Spending in the UKO' Dea and Preston, 2010 Public spending in the UK in 2008/9 amounted to over £10,000 per person or about 43% of national income (Crawford, Emmerson and Tetlow 2009) while net receipts from tax and social security contributions exceeded £8,000 per person or about 35% of national income. These transfers of resources between individuals and the state, either as cash payments or as supply of goods, affect individual standards of living and do so in ways that differ markedly between different households. Assessing the impact of government activity on the distribution of household living standards is essential to the evaluation of public service provision but raises challenging conceptual issues that we discuss in this report.The diversity of ways in which governments spend raises complex issues for assessment. In particular the distinction between straight cash transfers and provision of benefits in kind, and, within the provision of benefits in kind between provision of private and of public goods, may call for a variety of approaches in evaluation of the associated benefits. While cash transfers are often regarded (though even here there are issues) as straightforwardly allocable to well-identified recipients, some goods such as health or education services can be associated with specific recipients but at a valuation which ...

Government Expenditure in the DINA Framework: Allocation Methods and Consequences for Post-Tax Income Inequality

“…Note that we focus exclusively on the effect of government (in-kind) consumption expenditure and remain silent on the debate about issues in the measurement of pre-tax income, such as the allocation of business profits or untaxed pension income (Auten and Splinter 2019; Saez and Zucman 2020). 3 There is an older literature on the distribution of public (in-kind) expenditure (Callan, Smeeding, and Tsakloglou 2008;Garfinkel, Rainwater, and Smeeding 2006;Gillespie 1965;Horton and Reed 2010;Marical et al 2006;Musgrave, Case, and Leonard 1974;O'Dea and Preston 2012;O'Higgins and P. Ruggles 1981;P. Ruggles and O'Higgins 1981;Smeeding 1977;Smeeding et al 1993;Verbist, Förster, and Vaalavou 2012;Zwijnenburg, Bournot, and Giovannelli 2017).…”