Fiscal Studies (1993) vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 57 - 76 © Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2000 Welfare Benefits In Kind and Income Distribution MARIA EVANDROU,* JANE FALKINGHAM,✝ JOHN HILLS✝ and JULIAN LE GRAND✠ I. INTRODUCTION This article explores the value to households in different income groups of benefits from public spending on education, the National Health Service and subsidies to local authority housing. Its results are drawn from secondary analysis of the 1987 General Household Survey (GHS). The paper compares these findings with those which the Central Statistical Office (CSO, 1990) derived from the 1987 Family Expenditure Survey (FES). As well as using the more detailed information given by the GHS on use of health services and higher education than by the FES, we also apply some different methodological approaches from the CSO, including the allocation of higher education for students living away from home to their households of origin and the use of estimates of “economic’ housing subsidies. The CSO’s results are summarised in Section II, together with a discussion of some limitations of its approach, and the advantages (in some respects) of using GHS data. We present our main findings of distribution by income group in Section III. A more detailed discussion of the results for the separate areas of * Welfare State Programme, STICERD, London School of Economics; Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London. ✝ Welfare State Programme. ✠ Welfare State Programme; School of Advanced Urban Studies, University of Bristol. The authors are grateful for comments from participants in the 1991 annual conference of the Social Policy Association, and from Tony Atkinson, Karen Gardiner, Stephen Jenkins, Judith Payne, Carol Propper, David Winter and two anonymous referees. They are also grateful for support and help from Jane Dickson and Michelle Eyles, and from the Central Statistical Office, the ESRC Data Archive and the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. The paper forms part of the Welfare Research Programme at the London School of Economics, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (under Programme Grant X206 32 2001).