second restricting the analysis to the nonelderly avoids some of the problems that are inherent in comparing incomes between people who are at very different stages of their lives for instance an essential function of oldage pensions is to redistribute inter temporally over the life cycle a focus on the nonelderly helps in understanding the most important elements of interpersonal redistribution finally with growing pressure on public budgets due to ageing populations an important question is whether welfarestate provisions benefiting the workingage population are being restrained in order to finance support for the elderly a question of considerable policy relevance is to what extent changes can be attributed to direct policy action or to other factors that are less easily influenced by policy makers for any given household the taxes paid and the benefits received have a straightforward direct impact on the resources available for consumption at the population level however the assessment of trends in the redistributive properties of tax and benefit policies is complicated by the fact that market incomes and populations change at the same time as tax and benefit policy parameters