The benefits of parenting: Government financial support for families with children since 1975

In: (IFS Commentaries C091 ). Institute for Fiscal Studies: London, UK.

Abstract

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children.