Description: Carlos Arocha, the 2022 Chair of the International Section Council, introduces the articles featured in the current newsletter issue. In addition, he highlights recent and planned activities undertaken by the section.

Description: This book explores diplomatic strategy in an historical context. Many of the lessons in the book are useful to business decision-makers.

Description: What can the United States learn from other countries' health care systems? How are other countries more efficient? We selected five countries that have been among those debated as having some of the most efficient health care systems to explore what the United States can learn from these examples.

Description: Chairperson’s Corner

Description: The Actuary recently asked Bob Smyth of Gant Travel Management some questions regarding international travel. Smyth says if you plan well and are up to date on new regulations and passport requirements, traveling abroad is smooth sailing.

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ (SOA’s) educational track on General Insurance (property and casualty) was recently recognized by both Hong Kong and Singapore regulators.

Description: "Living to 100 in the time of COVID-19: A Study of Late –Life Mortality Trajectories, Leonid A. Gavrilov, Ph.D., Natalia S. Gavrilova, Ph.D., Academic Research Centers, NORC at the University of Chicago Swedish Mortality Does Not Decelerate in Recent Cohorts, or Does it? – Roland Rau, Ph. D., Professor, University of Rostock & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Marcus Ebeling, Ph.D., Karin Modig, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Anders Ahlbom, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm Sweden; Kai Kaufhold, Aktuar DAV, Ad Res Advanced Reinsurance Services GmbH, Cologne, Germany; Annika Ziegler, Lukas Stake, Hochschule Koblenz & Ad Res, Germany"

Description: Mortality Model Selection and Combination in RAlternative approaches for selecting mortality models and forecasting mortality have been proposed. The usual practice is to base mortality forecasts on a single mortality model selected using in-sample goodness-of-fit measures. However, cross-validation and other alternative out-of-sample measures are increasingly being used in model selection, and model combination methods are becoming a common alternative to using a single mortality model. Such methods combine predictions from multiple mortality models to reduce model choice uncertainty and improve forecast accuracy. Explore techniques to select and combine mortality models using the freely available open source R package CoMoMo (https://github.com/kessysalvatory/CoMoMo), which extends the widely used R package StMoMo (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=StMoMo). We will use data for the USA and other countries to discuss and demonstrate four different model combination approaches including simple model averaging, Bayesian model averaging, model confidence set, and stacked regression ensembles.

Description: This report models and forecasts future mortality improvements in China, by geographical regions, as well as by causes of death. Deaths and population exposures data provided by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was used for the period 2004–2019.

Description: This report provides statistical summaries of global warming trends using ERA5 data. The report compares temperature data from different time periods and highlights warming trends across air and sea-surface temperatures.