[wdmmg-discuss] Government Income Data

Wed Mar 24 20:44:11 UTC 2010

Our aim is to calculate an individual's contribution to the government 
income (to personalise the expenditure data we have). However, we do not 
want to ask more questions than is absolutely necessary (the aim is for at 
most 10 questions).

This requires identifying:
- the main taxes an individual or family would be subject to
- the rates and conditions for these taxes
- the national statistics for these taxes so we can work out the average
   tax the individual will pay.

At the moment we've collected most of the information in the main CKAN 
package here:

http://www.ckan.net/package/hmrc-national-statistics-income-tax-and-personal-incomes

Basically, we need to know:

   1. Income -> income tax paid
     * Here's income and tax by gender and location 
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/income_distribution/menu-by-year.htm#311
      But we are looking for more important factors that will affect tax paid
   1a: NICs and PAYEs -> how relevant are these?
   2. Mapping of spending on special areas (smoking, petrol etc) to tax
income.
     * e.g. for each £1 spent on cigarettes there is 20p tax revenue
   3. Mapping of income to VAT consumption (or simply VAT payment) -- crude 
approach is to divide total VAT by no. of people

Over the next week I'm working on filling out the income section in our 
data guide:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYn3JiuouxLUZGN0eGIzOWNfNDhjemQ1N2hnbg&hl=en

If you want to help out please dive in.

Lisa