Description: This discussion at the SOA 1967 Annual Meeting covers mortality issues including trends in longevity, factors affecting future mortality rates, and projection methods.

Description: The U.S. Bureau of the Census has rightfully earned a reputation for technical excellence. However, the author has run across an instance where this venerable, distinguished agency went sadly astray - namely, in connection with the number and proportion of employees of state and local governments who are covered by Social Security and Disability Insurance.

Description: From the 1960 Transactions Vol. 12 No. 32, this article is a discussion of the paper ‘A New Remarriage Table,’ by A. M. Niessen, which also appears in this volume of the Transactions. The contributors to the discussion provide their comments with respect to Mr. Niessen’s paper, which is based on his studies of widows’ remarriage rates.

Description: This section presents book reviews and summarizes recent publications on subjects that include U.K. social insurance, financing of hospital care, state examinations of life companies, approximate valuation of life and health insurance, mortality forecasting, and valuing estate tax.

Description: Presented at October 1985 Annual Meeting. Discusses how much of the sex mortality differential is due to smoking habits, how convincing are existing studies, what do worldwide trends in mortality suggest about the effects of smoking and on mortality, how well do insurers classify the smoking risk, and the United States Life Tables for 1979-81 paper by Myers and Bayo.

Description: The paper describes the various provisions of the new Soviet program - premium rates, pensionable ages, death benefits, withdrawal values, method of administration, and so on. This new program is intended to supplement the Soviet social security benefits.

Description: This paper presents an analysis of the mortality experience recorded in the 16 official complete life tables that have been published by the Japanese government, covering about a century. In addition to progress in industrial production, Japan has made remarkable progress in the demographic area, especially decreasing mortality rates of its people.

Description: This paper is from Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1955 Volume 7, Number 17. The authors note that ‘mortality experiences of large closed groups carried through until the termination of all the lives are not often available,’ but that they provide ‘relatively reliable mortality experience at the very advanced ages.’ This paper presents the results of the mortality study of probably the only such closed group to date in the United States, the pension roll of Union Civil War veterans.

Description: This article describes a report by the GAO that was prepared at the request of Congressman Wolff. Robert J. Myers, the author of the article, that the GAO report is “an excellent summary of the various recent studies on the financial problems confronting the OASDI system. Four of the studies have been recently reviewed in The Actuary: An Actuarial Audit of the Social Security System by Kaplan and Weil April 1975, the 1975 Trustees Report June 1975, Report of the Panel on Social Security Financing to the Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate May 1975, and Reports of the Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security October 1975. Also considered in the report are editorial comments by The Wall Street Journal which first impelled Congressman Wolff to request the GAO Report.”

Description: Provides a methodology for determining the value of the share of a particular individual in a joint and survivor annuity held by a trust.