Tax and benefit payments are said to “redistribute” if they lower inequality, regardless of the extent to which this is achieved through actual or implicit transfers from higher to lower-income groups.1 As in other parts of this report, changes in the income distribution are analysed here using “snapshots” for individual years. The reference period is the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. International comparisons tend to focus on specific parts of the tax-benefit system (Heady et al.,