Using skills development strategies to tackle poverty and inequality

Abstract

On the face of it, it seems obvious that enabling people to develop their skills and improve their education would be an important way of decreasing their chances of experiencing poverty. For individuals, this can often be true, but when one looks at the full distribution of families and households in the context of wider changes in both the labour market and tax and benefit systems, the picture becomes much less straightforward. This paper outlines research to test strategies for developing skills that might be used, and argues that these could worsen levels of poverty and income inequality if some of the interactions and underlying relationships are not better understood.