Asia and the Pacific has the most diverse regional pension landscape globally. Yet the region's pension systems are facing common challenges as they attempt to expand coverage, and ensure adequacy and fairness, while maintaining fiscal sustainability. We review the structures and performance of...

Australia has an atypical retirement income system: it comprises a flat-rate, non-contributory, affluence-tested age pension, and a mandatory, defined contribution accumulation plan to which employers must contribute 9.25 percent (moving to 12 percent) of wages on behalf of their employees. We...

Asia and the Pacific has the most diverse regional pension landscape globally. Yet the region's pension systems are facing common challenges as they attempt to expand coverage, and ensure adequacy and fairness, while maintaining fiscal sustainability. We review the structures and performance of...

Asian countries are at different stages of demographic transition. While Central and South Asian countries are relatively young and will remain so for some time, East and Southeast Asia are expected to age at an unprecedented rate in the next few decades. Japan has reached the future first....

The complex matrix of retirement policy trade-offs -encompassing elements of paternalism, market failure, and overlaying incentives in a life-cycle context- have received much attention in the literature. But the issue of whether publicly-funded retirement provision should be means-tested, and...

This study analyzes the relative performance in terms of welfare of the current U.S. PAYG system compared to an array of cost equivalent alternative specifications of means-tested pension programs. We conduct our analysis under two different settings. While in the first setting, individuals have...

This paper studies the interaction between capital income taxation and a means tested age pension in the context of an overlapping generations model, calibrated to the UK economy. Recent literature has suggested a rehabilitation of capital income taxation (Conesa et al. (2009)), predicated on...

Large publicly-held pools of assets are playing an increasingly prominent role in the global investment arena. We compare three distinct forms of such public funds, namely foreign exchange reserve funds, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension funds, to highlight their differences and...

In this paper, we investigate two fiscal policy options to mitigate fiscal pressure arising from ageing of the Australian population: pension cuts or tax hikes. Using a computable overlapping generations model, we find that while both policy options achieve the same fiscal goal, the...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of hypothetical replacements of existing tax arrangements applied to superannuation (Australia.s term for private pensions) with traditional EET and TEE regimes. These taxation regimes exempt pension fund earnings from any taxation and tax either...