"If a person dies prematurely, all their remaining essence is released. It decays quickly and returns to the atmosphere. If you're in the immediate vicinity and you're fast, you can probably collect about 1/4 of what they had before it vanishes..."
"Essence in the atmosphere is difficult to harvest. Each major country has a technique to harvest it, and the central government of each country controls that harvest and disperses it."
This seems to be a recipe to encourage Nazi-like death camps. General warfare doesn't do much good, because you can't efficiently harvest the essence of an enemy killed on the battlefield.
But put someone in a death camp, and hold him/her until you can put him into a special chamber designed to harvest as much essence as possible, then kill him under controlled conditions. That way you get a lot of essence. Unpopular groups... would simply disappear, captured in government pogroms and sent to the death camps.
And all nations of the world would find a reason to justify this. The cultures which would not, would fail to compete with those which would, and would themselves be wiped out.
Furthermore, people in general would be far more likely to agitate for the death penalty for even minor infractions of the law. Possibly even for merely eccentric behavior... or a strange appearance. Phrenology, anyone? This would be a world in which "witch hunts" and the like would be commonplace, because there would be a real benefit to communities to single out unpopular individuals and sentence them to death... so their essence could be harvested.
I don't think this would be a pleasant world in which to live.
"you need to hold onto money to live, so I doubt banks will be as popular"
Not seeing that, at all. Having a large retirement account becomes much, much more important! People would have a strong motive to start saving for it as soon as possible, and scrimp and save whenever they could, to extend their lifespan.