There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

This paper demonstrates that the link between heterogeneity in longevity and lifetime income across countries is mostly high and often increasing; that it translates into an implicit tax/subsidy, with rates reaching 20 percent and higher in some countries; that such rates risk perverting...

In many policy areas it is essential to use the best estimates of life expectancy, but such estimates are vital to most areas of pension policy - from indexed access age and the calculation of initial benefits to the financial sustainability of pension schemes and the operation of their...