All advanced economies are becoming older, and Healthy Ageing has been listed as one of priority themes of the smart growth dimension of Europe 2020 (European Commission, 2010a), the European Union's development strategy. More recently, healthy ageing has been promoted as a flagship research priority for many countries, including UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland. Clearly, ageing is on the international policy agenda. Societal ageing has two major drivers, namely ageing due to health-care improvements afforded by the large cohort of baby-boomers, and also ageing due to the slowdown in the subsequent replacement ratios. In some sense the former driver is a good news story as it derives from improvements in the health-related quality of life. In contrast, the latter driver of ageing is a rather more complex story, and the positive and negative distributional impacts of this latter driver fall differently on different social groups. In particular, these intergenerational effects imply that the working life expectancy of future generations will increase, while the pension returns are likely to fall. In OECD countries, the current retirement group is the wealthiest social cohort in history, having benefited from both the post-World War II economic boom of the 20th century and the mortgage repayment effects of the 1970s inflation. In contrast, the current younger age groups face many years of low growth, low pension accumulation effects, and low housing equity gain, the effects of which have been exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis. Older age groups appear to be in more favourable circumstances than younger age groups. In addition, these demographic distributional shifts have no spatial implications per se. As such, these observations

The paper analyses the role of tax competition in global economy. How can tax systems respond to the challenge - by international cooperation or by national rules, by tax harmonisation or by tax competition? In this paper we approach the question as a matter of global governance. Tax competition is seen both as a means and as an object of global governance. Our conclusion is that there is no universal answer to the question: competition or harmonisation? Attempts to govern the processes of global economy on a national level may easily lead to tax competition. On the other hand, at least at the supranational level, i.e. at regional or global level, the goals and mechanisms of governance seem to emphasise harmonisation. Nowadays especially the OECD has become an important actor or forum for cooperation in taxation. It has succeeded in many ways in preventing and reducing harmful tax competition. The soft law mechanisms developed by the OECD have often been converted into the hard law mechanisms on national level. The governance activities have been based on both soft law and hard law mechanisms.