Second, restricting the analysis to the non-elderly 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 old-age pensions is to redistribute inter temporally over the life cycle, a focus on the non-elderly 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 welfare-state provisions benefiting the working-age 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.