The transition from communism to capitalism in Europe and central Asia during the early to mid-1990s has had devastating consequences for health: UNICEF attributes more than 3 million premature deaths to transition; the UN Development Programme estimates over 10 million missing men because of system change; and more than 15 years after these transitions began, only a little over half of the ex-communist countries have regained their pre-transition life-expectancy levels...

Our study has shown that mass privatisation programmes were associated with a short-term increase in mortality rates in working-aged men. Furthermore, increased unemployment rates during this time were strongly associated with mortality in countries of the former Soviet Union.

Our results accord with other data... Overall, countries that pursued mass privatisation in the early to mid-1990s had sharp drops in life expectancy; in those that did not, life expectancy dipped modestly, but then steadily improved. Unemployment rates followed a similar trend: increases were pronounced in countries that privatised rapidly but much more modest in countries that privatised more slowly. Four of the five worst countries, in terms of life expectancy, had implemented mass privatisation, whereas only one of the five best performers had done so.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published the latest annual update of its "minimum income standards" (MIS). These standards provide a measure of how much various types of households need to earn to reach what members of the public think is a minimum acceptable standard of living.

... in contrast to official inflation over the past decade of 23%, minimum budget costs have risen by 38% over that period, largely because of increased costs of food (37%), bus fares (59%), and council tax (67%). This demonstrates the often cited reality that price inflation for goods that dominate the budgets of poorer households is greater than for the average household’s budget; this is important because the official inflation figure is used to update all state benefits, and these form a higher proportion of income for people on the lowest incomes...

A single person who could just manage in 2000, and whose income has only kept pace with inflation, will by April 2010 have been nearly £20 a week short of what he or she needs to meet the minimum budget. What will these people have had to go without to avoid getting into debt? If they are unemployed, as 29% of UK single adults of working age are, the basic out of work benefits provide less than half the MIS a single adult needs. For unemployed couples with children benefits provide about two thirds of what they need. Working couples with two children now need an income of £29 700 a year to afford a basic but acceptable standard of living (including childcare costs). This equates to £7.60 an hour, but the minimum wage is only £5.80 an hour, and around 23% of full time workers and 39% of part time workers aged 22 and above were paid less than £7 an hour in 2009,3 so low pay must affect the wellbeing of many households.

The cut in central government public services spending as a share of national income now planned by the Coalition will more than reverse the entire increase we saw under Labour. We are looking at the longest, deepest sustained period of cuts to public services spending at least since World War II.

On the tax side, yesterday’s package added up to an £8 billion net tax increase in 2014–15, but this comprised roughly £20 billion of tax increases offset by roughly £12 billion of tax cuts. When Mr Osborne said that “the years of debt and spending” made the £13 billion increase in VAT unavoidable you might just as well say it was his desire to cut other taxes that made it so.

Turning to the distributional impact of the Budget, Mr Osborne and Mr Clegg have been keen to describe yesterday’s measures as “progressive” in the sense that the rich will feel more pain than the poor. That is a debateable claim...

The Budget looks ... somewhat regressive – when you take out the effect of measures that were inherited from the previous Government, when you look further into the future than 2012–13 and when you include some other measures that the Treasury has chosen not to model... [P]erhaps the most important omission in any distributional analysis of this sort is the impact of the looming cuts to public services, which are likely to hit poorer households significantly harder than richer households.