Providing for retirement is a prominent motivation for saving. Saving for retirement raises several issues: how much to save, which asset allocation to choose and which degree of risk to afford, how to annuitize efficiently. In addition, there is an important, though sometimes neglected, issue: tax. Basically, saving means postponing consumption, transferring purchasing power into the future. The efficiency of this transfer may be measured by the net real rate of return (NRRR). This paper addresses the issue of analysing and quantifying the impact of tax systems on the NRRR. That impact may be huge, and strongly interact with the “how much to save” issue. We illustrate our analysis with the cases of the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Canada.
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