Description: This essay examines several key factors that have contributed to China’s success in the economic reform spanning the past three decades and the double-edged nature of these factors going forward.

Description: The SOA is committed to meeting member and candidate needs outside North America.

Description: The SOA has a growing number of research projects specifically addressing opportunities and insights for its membership in Asia.

Description: The Lee and Carter LC method is getting widely adopted for long-run forecasts of age specific mortality rates. That popularity is first due to the model simplicity. Moreover, the LC model has given successful results for various countries e.g. U.S., Chile, G7 countries. However, some difficulties arose when using population data from certain countries such as UK and Australia. In the present paper, the LC model is applied to data from four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The Singular Value Decomposition SVD, the Weighted Least Square WLS and the Maximum Likelihood estimate MLE are used. These approaches give satisfactory results. The appropriate fitting period needs, however, to be well chosen. The properties of the model's parameters are studied using a bootstrap simulation.

Description: This article by Carlos Arocha explores the protection gap throughout Latin America for coverage against natural catastrophic events. As climate change has increased both the frequency and severity of these events, coverage gaps have weighed on both household and public sector economics. In the article, Carlos highlights different methods for evaluating the size of this protection gap, and discusses a number of different ideas for closing this gap, through private sector initiatives, public sector changes, or private-public partnerships.

Description: This article outlines and summarizes research from Swiss Re about the prevalence of the Health Protection Gap throughout Asia, with a particular focus on China. Authors Robert Burr and David Zhang share key statistics on the scope of the gap, which is more than 800Bn USD in China alone, and discuss the role that technology and private-public partnership can play in reducing this gap over time. Readers will come away with an understanding of the scale of the problem within the Asia region as well as new ideas on how to solve similar problems within their own region.

Description: In this Get REAL workshop, you will work through sticky situations and discuss how to handle them, hear what the conversations sound like, be able to identify the stories you're creating and know what to do if you are the lone wolf on the topic.

Description: SOA participation in international meetings in India and Russia.

Description: Account of a joint colloquium of three International Actuarial Association sections. The overall theme of the event was "The Actuarial Profession and Social and Economic Development."

Description: Recap of the World Bank's visit to Argentina.