The Distribution of Public Expenditures and Taxes Among Households in the United Kingdom*

This paper presents an analysis of the distributive impact of public expenditures and taxes in the United Kingdom. The analysis uses household level microdata from the 1971 Family Expenditure Survey, with tax and expenditure aggregates drawn from the national accounts. The analysis is the first to allocate all taxes and public expenditures for the United Kingdom, and the results are compared to those from the more restricted analyses carried out by the U.K. Central Statistical Office. Results are presented for individual taxes and benefits as well as for overall net benefits and they describe distributional effects with respect to income class, household size, number of earners and housing tenure. A final section of the paper compares the results to those from a similar analysis for the United States which were reported in the previous issue of this review.