Tibor Barna: the redistributive impact of taxes and social policies in the UK 1937-2005

Regular annual studies made by the Office of National Statistics in the UK are intended to show how far taxing household incomes and giving benefits in cash and kind to households redistributes income from rich to poor. The first attempt to do this in the UK was made by Tibor Barna for the year 1937. Subsequently his approach has been replicated and elaborated. This study reworks and compares data from various studies to see how the scale and nature of the state’s redistributive role has changed over the past seventy years. Differences in methods and data make comparisons difficult but some broad conclusions can be drawn. Some methodological issues are also discussed on the question of how to approach household equivalisation when services in kind are treated as income

Marr's vision: twenty-five years on

It is twenty-five years since the posthumous publication of David Marr's book Vision [1]. Only 35 years old when he died, Man, had already dramatically influenced vision research. His book, and the series of papers that preceded it, have had a lasting impact on the way that researchers approach human and computer vision

US poverty studies and poverty measurement: the past twenty-five years

This paper discusses the contribution made by American social scientists to the study of poverty in the past twenty five years. It has three parts. The first concentrates on the measurement of poverty and the fact that the US poverty line remained unchanged in that period despite its increasingly important deficiencies. Proposals to produce a revised poverty line and an Annual Poverty Report are advanced. The second part traces the change of emphasis in US writing about poverty both in terms of academic emphasis and prescription. The final part considers the policy impact of American work on poverty policy beyond America. This paper has been published as: "US Poverty Studies and Poverty Measurement: The past twenty-five years", Social Service Review, March 200

US Poverty Studies and Poverty Measurement: The past 25 years

This paper discusses the contribution made by American social scientists to the study of poverty in the past twenty five years. It has three parts. The first concentrates on the measurement of poverty and the fact that the US poverty line remained unchanged in that period despite its increasingly important deficiencies. Proposals to produce a revised poverty line and an Annual Poverty Report are advanced. The second part traces the change of emphasis in US writing about poverty both in terms of academic emphasis and prescription. The final part considers the policy impact of American work on poverty policy beyond America.Poverty, poverty measurement, United States

United Kingdom Education 1997-2001

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour Government's education policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that his Government would make education a priority. The first part of the paper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to the economy at large and within the education budget. The second part of the paper looks at the productivity of schools. How far have the changes that have affected schools in the past ten years and the past five in particular affected the quality of school achievements? The paper suggests there have been significant improvements not just on average but especially in the gains made in poor areas and in the least good schools. Finally the paper discusses the funding of higher education, the introduction of income related loans to cover maintenance and up front fees. The paper concludes some serious errors were made in policy design. Even so the use of the Inland Revenue as the collection agency was a successful innovation and should be built upon.education productivity, higher education finance, Labour education policy

A Wealth Tax Abandoned: The role of the UK Treasury 1974-6

The distribution of wealth is widening in many countries and with it the importance of inherited wealth. In 1974 a Labour Government came to power in the United Kingdom committed to introducing an annual wealth tax. It left office without doing so. Using the official archives of the time and those of a key advisor this paper traces both the origins of the policy and its fate in Whitehall. It explores two related questions. What does this experience tell us about the role of the civil service in the policy process in the UK and what lessons might be learned by those wishing to tackle the issue of widening wealth disparities today?wealth tax, policy process, UK Treasury

Cue combination for 3D location judgements

Cue combination rules have often been applied to the perception of surface shape but not to judgements of object location. Here, we used immersive virtual reality to explore the relationship between different cues to distance. Participants viewed a virtual scene and judged the change in distance of an object presented in two intervals, where the scene changed in size between intervals (by a factor of between 0.25 and 4). We measured thresholds for detecting a change in object distance when there were only 'physical' (stereo and motion parallax) or 'texture-based' cues (independent of the scale of the scene) and used these to predict biases in a distance matching task. Under a range of conditions, in which the viewing distance and position of the tarte relative to other objects was varied, the ration of 'physical' to 'texture-based' thresholds was a good predictor of biases in the distance matching task. The cue combination approach, which successfully accounts for our data, relies on quite different principles from those underlying geometric reconstruction

Representing 3D shape and location

The 3D shape of an object and its 3D location have traditionally thought of as very separate entities, although both can be described within a single 3D coordinate frame. Here, 3D shape and location are considered as two aspects of a view-based approach to representing depth, avoiding the use of 3D coordinate frames