Two strategies that governments have to help people on low incomes, providing them with financial support directly, and encouraging them to earn more, generally conflict. This event launches a new report by IFS researchers, The Poverty Trade-Off: Work incentives and income redistribution in Britain, which provides new evidence on the trade-off between redistributing income and improving work incentives. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the report:

• shows how work incentives vary across the population and how this has changed since 1979;
• estimates how far tax and benefit reforms have been responsible for changes in work incentives;
• compares these trends with trends in poverty and inequality;
• examines how various policy options for the future would affect the distributions of both income and work incentives.