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February 2025

UK. Pensions inheritance tax raid to punish 150,000 families with higher bills

Labour’s pensions inheritance tax raid will hit 150,000 grieving families with higher death duty bills, figures show. Rachel Reeves’s decision to apply inheritance tax to pension wealth from April 2027 will drag 31,200 families into paying the levy for the first time by 2030, according to data obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Some 121,500 families that already pay inheritance tax will also see their bills rise as a result of the change. The policy means that estates with relatively modest assets...

January 2025

2025 Pension Updates And Tax Changes Impact Mexican Retirees

Pension payments now subject to taxes after surpassing new UMA thresholds starting this year. Every year at the start of January, the value of the Unidad de Medida y Actualización (UMA) increases, leading to adjustments in the exempt amounts for pension payments. Recently, it was announced once again the increment of this measure, which is pivotal for various obligations and taxes levied by both the federal government and the states. The UMA not only plays a role in determining tax...

Retirees Relocate for Income Tax Exemptions

By Linda Gorman In 2013, the Portuguese government offered foreign retirees relocating to Portugal a 10-year tax exemption on their foreign-source pension income, provided their country of origin had a tax treaty with Portugal. As the number of immigrant retirees grew, the amount of forgone income taxes grew, reaching €1.5 billion, or about 0.6 percent of GDP, by 2021. In that year, the tax exemption was replaced by a 10 percent rate. In 2024, the exemption was repealed. Source National Bureau...

October 2024

UK. Tax-free withdrawals from pension pots surge amid fears over autumn budget

Savers have started to withdraw cash from their pension pots amid fears over potential tax changes at the autumn budget, according to investment companies. The investment platform AJ Bell said reports that the chancellor, Rachel Reeeves, was likely to increase taxes at the budget on 30 October had spooked some of its customers into new retirement savings decisions. The wealth management firm Quilter, which manages more than £113bn of customers’ money, also said it had experienced a surge in calls from...

September 2024

Pensioners Without Borders: Agglomeration and the Migration Response to Taxation

By Salla Kalin, Antoine Levy & Mathilde Munoz  This paper investigates whether and why pensioners move across borders in response to tax rate differentials. In 2013, retirees relocating to Portugal became eligible to a full tax exemption of foreign-source pensions. Contrary to the broadly held belief that seniors "age in place", we find substantial international mobility responses to the reform, concentrated among wealthy and educated pensioners in higher-tax origin countries. The implied migration elasticity of the stock of foreign pensioners...

August 2024

UK. Reeves could raise £10bn a year by reducing pension tax relief, report says

Rachel Reeves could raise at least £10bn a year through a radical shake-up of pensions that would make tax relief less generous to better-off earners, a leading left-of-centre thinktank has said. The report by the Fabian Society says tax breaks for pensions have become markedly more expensive for the government and its proposed changes would fill half the £22bn shortfall the chancellor has identified in the public finances. Reeves has dropped strong hints that she is planning a tough, tax-raising budget on...

July 2024

The Bulgarian Pension System: Caught Between Adequacy And Sustainability

By Jean-Jacques Hallaert During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bulgarian authorities increased pensions substantially to support pensioners’ living standards and aggregate demand. These increases have become permanent and improved the adequacy of pensions. However, not matched by revenue measures, they have widened the deficit of the pension system. Reforms that increase the incentives to contribute to the pension system and thus revenue would improve the financial sustainability of the pension system and reduce fiscal risks. Source SSRN

Pension Systems (Un) Sustainability and Fiscal Constraints: A Comparative Analysis

By Michael Wickens, Vito Polito & Burkhard Heer Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic uncertainties. These measures reveal that the pension spaces of advanced economies are strikingly different. Most nations have little scope to further finance pensions out of labour income  taxation over the next thirty years....

UK. ‘Astonishing’ surge in pensioners paying top tax rate

The number of pensioners paying the highest rate of tax has doubled in just a year following a cut in thresholds. More than 100,000 taxpayers over the age of 65 will pay 45p in the pound on their income in the 2023-2024 tax year, projected HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) figures have revealed. This is up from just 55,000 the year before, according to the data released to The Telegraph under a Freedom of Information request. The number of pension-age taxpayers hit...

Changing Retirement Incentives and Retirement in the US

By Courtney Coile Employment rates of older Americans have been rising since the 1990s. While the US is fairly unique among advanced economies in not experiencing any large-scale pension reforms in recent decades, there have been multiple changes to Social Security policy that have strengthened the incentive to work at older ages. This study builds on prior work documenting the changes in retirement incentives over time to explore the effect of these changes on retirement behavior, using over two decades...