Professor Tim Callan:

When we have something to say about areas in which the system could be improved, we tend to say it. We will have a budget perspectives conference in June and we are working on two papers related to potential improvements for it. One is about the idea of the back to work family dividend, medical cards and housing assistance payment improving the incentive to work. The other is examining options for tax and universal social charge, USC, and will be a forward-looking rather than a backward-looking paper. I hope they will contribute something.

Given that our role is to produce accurate numbers and let others judge, I will adopt a similar strategy to Professor Watson's on comparisons between this Government and the previous one. There is a theme in economics around the idea that one can observe the actions of governments in these distributive areas and infer their preferences between different income groups. It has always struck me that there is a missing link in the literature - namely, that governments at different times are choosing from different possibilities and choice sets, and this comes into play when one is trying to evaluate them.