The light from our eyes

In which Max is horrified that 50% of American college students think their eyes illuminate the world. Orin thinks they may be on to something. Meanwhile, Freya is entranced by an expensive array of colored circles

What do the child poverty targets mean for the child tax credit? An update

The government has a target for child poverty to fall to 3.1 million by 2004-05, measured by the number of children in households with less than 60% median income after housing costs. The latest data showed that 3.8 million children (30% of children in Britain) were in poverty in 2001-02 on this definition. To help achieve the target, increases to means-tested benefits and tax credits need to take effect in April 2004, and therefore need to be announced in the forthcoming Pre-Budget Report. New calculations suggest that around £1 billion of further spending on the child tax credit might be needed to meet the child poverty target. Increases in other benefits or tax credits could also reduce child poverty, but at greater cost. But if the government chooses not to increase support for families with children in 2004-05, then real spending on child-contingent support in the tax and benefit system will still have increased by over 50% since 1997, and child poverty in 2004-05 should be at its lowest level since 1989. The government is still deciding what definition of child poverty it wishes to target in the longer term. If it wishes to reduce further child poverty measured under its current definition, then this will require the means-tested benefits and tax credits received by poor families with children to rise faster than the rate of inflation in the absence of helpful economic or demographic changes, such as more parents working. However, continuing to target a poverty measure defined exclusively in terms of incomes may skew the policy response excessively towards tax credit and means-tested benefits changes, and away from improving public services for children which might have a greater impact on their well-being over the longer term. By way of example, the extra spending that we think is needed for the government to meet its target for 2004-05 would pay for the current Sure Start programme - which aims to improve the health and well-being of families and children aged under 5 in disadvantaged areas - to be doubled in size

Proportion of families, and of individuals living in families, who have private incomes exceeding their net income from the state

This Briefing Note examines what proportion of families have pre-tax private incomes exceeding net support from the state (see the Annex below for precise definitions of all these terms). The analysis was undertaken using the IFS tax and benefit microsimulation model, TAXBEN, and data from the Family Resources Survey and the Family Expenditure Survey

Universal Access-NY User’s Guide

What is Universal Access-NY? Universal Access-NY is a complete online planning toolkit, www.UniversalAccessNY.org, where a One-Stop Delivery System can assess its practices, and develop work plans to improve physical and programmatic accessibility for all One-Stop customers. This web site and manual was developed by Cornell University’s Employment and Disability Institute, through the support and guidance of the New York State Department of Labor, with funding from two U.S. Department of Labor Work Incentive Grants (WIG 1 and 2). This web site was designed for use in a collaborative manner, bringing together One-Stop personnel, agency partners, business leaders and customers with disabilities. Universal Access-NY supports continuous improvement, with features that encourage multiple uses and incremental systems change

Welfare reform in the UK: 1997 - 2007

This paper presents a tour of welfare reform in the UK since the last change of government, summarising the most important changes in active labour market policies, and in measures intended to strengthen financial incentives to work. It argues that developments in the UK’s active labour market policies occurred in two broad phases: first, the Government sought to strengthen ALMPs for those individuals deemed to be unemployed, through the New Deal programme. Second, the Government has reformed benefits for individuals traditionally viewed as inactive and thus excused job search activity, such as lone parents, and the sick and disabled. Accompanying these have been changes to direct taxes, tax credits and welfare benefits aiming to strengthen financial work incentives. However, financial work incentives have been strengthened by less than might be expected given the early rhetoric: the expansion in family-based tax credits have weakened the financial work incentives of (potential) second earners in families with children, many more workers now face combined marginal tax and tax credit withdrawal rates in excess of 60% than a decade ago, and a desire to achieve broad reductions in relative child poverty has led the Government to increase substantially income available to non-working families with children. We also summarise evaluations of three important UK welfare-to-work reforms (WFTC, NDYP and Pathways to Work), but without comparing their efficacy

Will the government hit its child poverty target in 2004-05?

This Briefing Note assesses the likelihood that the government will meet its child poverty target in 2004-05 in the light of decisions made in Pre-Budget Report (PBR) 2003. It updates the analysis presented in What Do the Child Poverty Targets Mean for the Child Tax Credit? An Update, IFS Briefing Note 41, which was written before PBR 2003. We agree with the assessment in PBR 2003 that the government should comfortably meet its target measuring incomes before housing costs (BHC). It also concludes that the government is on course to just hit its target measuring incomes after housing costs (AHC). However, there are uncertainties in making these forecasts, not least because the government uses a survey of around 30,000 households to estimate child poverty in a population roughly a thousand times as large. We should know for sure whether the target has been hit in Spring 2006

Child poverty and tax credit changes: a note for the Work and Pensions Select Committee

Previous IFS work has confirmed the intuition that, for a given level of expenditure, increasing the per-child element of the child tax credit will have a larger direct impact on poverty than increasing the family element or increasing child benefit. In a recent note, we built on this by estimating the number of children that would be taken out of poverty by five hypothetical policy reforms: increases in the per-child element of the child tax credit of £3/week; increasing all adult allowances in income support by £2.50 a week; introducing a new premium into the child tax credit which is paid to families with three or more children. The premium would be worth £845 a year to all families with three or more children with joint annual incomes below £50,000; increasing the working tax credit for all families with children by £11.75 a week

Revisiting Maine’s lobster commons: rescaling political subjects

Calls for cross-scalar theoretical and methodological approaches are not new to commons scholarship. Such efforts might be hastened by channelling poststructuralist and critical theory perspectives through the geographic subfield of political ecology, including attention to political scales and subjects. Toward this end, this paper reconsiders Maine’s lobster fishery. This case has provided rich material for watershed commons scholarship, demonstrating the ability of social groups to conserve resources independent of government or markets, and it continues to offer new findings. Recent fieldwork shows that as lobster boat captains advance collective interests through state-supported co-management governance arrangements, concerns of crew and non-fishing community members may be marginalized. Regulatory exclusion prevents broader distribution of resource benefits at a time when employment alternatives are scarce. More pluralistic approaches to commons theory and its policy application have utility well beyond the lobster case

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