Description: summary of Canadian topics from recent Retirement Section Council meeting. Update on defined contribution initiative and potential US legislation. Highlight recent SOA research on retirement income.

Description: The Actuary Vol. 22, No. 1. This article discusses the impact of a change in procedure in the financing of the US Military Retirement System. The change requires amortizing the past service liability. The impact will depend upon whether the amortization is achieved by increasing current taxes and decreasing the current deficit, or by merely increasing the national debt and leaving the current deficit unchanged. The author asserts that the new financing method will not weaken the financial condition of the military retirement system, and that it has the potential to strengthen its financial condition if the funding of the past service liability is handled appropriately.

Description: State and local pension plans provide their stakeholders with a great deal of information. However, that information is typically not presented in a user-friendly way. Summary documents often fail to give their readers a clear and comprehensive picture of a plan's finances. The premise of the SOA Project described in this article is that there is a need for concise summary reviews of a plan's operations. The Project's mandate included the preparation of two sample reviews of two different state systems that might serve as models, but not rigid templates for reviews prepared by plan management. This article describes and compares the two reviews and their accompanying dashboards, and also addresses the Project's broader goals. The article emphasizes that it is not the exact shape or format of a summary review that matters, but how effectively it conveys the current state and prospects of a plan's finances.

Description: Retirement Symposium overview. A session by session synopsis of the wide ranging topics presented.

Description: In 1995, Mexico replaced the public pay-as-you-go system by a privately managed system based on individual accounts. This paper analyzes the causes that made necessary the reform of the old Mexican pay-as-you-go pension system. A description of the modifications and current situation of the pension system also are discussed. The paper concludes that although the pension system has been modified during the last few years, there are still some weaknesses that have to be corrected to provide an appropriate retirement benefit to workers.

Description: Chapter 6 of the Models for Retirement Policy Analysis. This chapter describes DYNACAN, a dynamic microsimulation model developed and maintained in the Office of the Chief Actuary OCA of the Canada Pension Plan. It simulates the basic demographic and economic events relevant for calculation of CPP contributions and benefits. The strengths and limitations of the approach are addressed as well as accessibility and ease of use.

Description: A discussion of where insurance companies and their products fit in the retirement asset market and trends over the past few decades. Some historical data on the insurance companies' share of retirement assets is included.

Description: Mexico substituted its defined benefit system [IMSS] of the formal sector by a defined contribution system in 1997. The initial plan called for buying single premium annuities for the widows and disabled workers under the new system. In the first three years, this market came to occupy a significant part of the insurance sector. Then, the number of workers getting benefits started to fall dramatically. This is the abstract of a paper that shows that such a fall has been a direct result of how the IMSS authorizes the issuance of single premium annuities. The paper analyses the rationale behind such a dramatic change in policy, analyzes various possible scenarios of IMSS strategies, and examines the problem to see if it brings in any long-term benefits to IMSS.

Description: An Interview with John Cutler and An Enhanced Social Security Annuity

Description: Chapter 1 describes important changes in Mexico in the 1990s such as re-privatization of banks, relaxed financial regulation, membership in NAFTA and OECD, and political change at the federal level. From Retrospective and Perspective Analysis of the Privatized Mandatory Pension System in Mexico, M-RS02-1.