Description: This article is an introduction to the topic of mortality projections and their impact on social security systems. The article reviews two life expectancy graphs and overall trends in life expectancy by gender at birth and age 65 in the United States, Canada and the UK.

Description: This paper presents a general law of mortality that is equal to a mixture of Gompertz, Weibull, Inverse-Gompertz, and Inverse-Weibull survival functions.

Description: This article is a book review of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism written by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The book highlights factors that have attributed to the decline in life expectancy in the U.S. over the past two decades. Overall, there has been a significant increase in deaths of despair from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease that has impacted life expectancy. The review of this book highlights key points and factors in this increase in deaths of despair based on the research of the authors. From an actuarial perspective, this book identifies areas within the U.S. society and economy that would continue this trend and impact future mortality rates and improvement scales.

Description: This report examines the mortality of Canadian pensioners subdivided by pension level, using data from the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Québec Pension Plan (QPP)

Description: This report reviews estimates of 2017 U.S. population mortality experience from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System.

Description: The Human Mortality Database is a unique collection of detailed mortality and population data with complete and reliable vital registration and census data.

Description: This paper is the final report in a project commissioned by the Society of Actuaries Social Security Committee. The paper considers a variety of possible risk classification factors that could be used in estimating the value of any mortality based benefit for retirees. As many countries consider mandatory individual retirement accounts as their answer to a secure Social Security system, the question arises as to whether all workers can get true 'market value' annuities when they retire. It is clear today that private sector life annuities are priced assuming that the applicant is healthy-very healthy. Very little underwriting or risk classification now exists in the individual annuity marketplace. This paper reviews 45 recent research papers that look at factors that affect mortality after retirement. In particular, factors that seem to be important in predicting retirement mortality include: age, gender, race and ethnicity, education, income, occupation, marital status, religion, health behaviors, smoking, alcohol, and obesity. For each factor, this paper gives highlights relative to the named factor of the impact expected from that variable as described in the 45 reviewed research papers.

Description: A detailed statistical analysis of mortality improvement for the Canadian population and for the Canadian insured lives conducted by the Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance.

Description: This editorial explains the benefits of a recent seminar among NAFTA countries on mortality improvement and how social security systems can be affected.