Annuities promise to play an increasingly important role in countries with national defined contribution retirement systems. In this article we examine life annuities in two countries, Singapore and Australia, each of which has a national mandatory pension program. Exploiting data on annuity pricing and purchase behaviour, we compare the money's worth of life annuity products across these two nations. Our results indicate that, after controlling on administrative loadings, there are important differences in measured adverse selection. Part of the explanation may be due to the different structures of the two countries' retirement systems.

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Australia's taxation arrangements for retirement saving are among the most complicated in the world. It is almost unique in applying tax at all three possible points in the retirement saving cycle: contributions, earnings and benefits. Starting from the proposition that the 'best' pension tax is to tax benefits under the personal income tax, this paper proposes a 'withholding tax' arrangement which would have impacts on individual contributors equivalent to a benefit tax, while altering the time profile of tax collections to address cash-flow concerns on the part of the revenue authorities. Simulations are presented to show that individual contributors benefit from the proposed reform, and that equity across contributors in different wage bands is broadly maintained.

This article provides a comparative analysis of the sales of the Trident nuclear missile system to Britain by the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations. Both governments viewed the Anglo–American nuclear partnership as a tool within their wider foreign policy kit and utilised the sale of Trident to influence British defence policy. For these reasons, each administration saw the Trident sale as part of an Anglo–American transactional defence relationship. This exegesis deepens understanding of the United States perspective on Anglo–American nuclear co-operation. Moreover, it is relevant to current debates on the replacement of Trident because it highlights the ramifications of Britain’s technical dependence and raises questions about the concessions that may have been made, or will need to be made, to the United States in exchange for the latter’s assistance with replacement