Description: Neil Brougham, chairman of the CPD Committee, welcomes the new certificate in practical financial economics CPFE.

Description: Final installment of a series on the evolution of risk management with a close look at high profile failed corporations.

Description: This article provides a flavor for the wealth of statistical information provided by the Bureau Of Economic Analysis. It describes the BEA program, tells how to obtain BEA outputs, and looks at some issues BEA faces.

Description: It is now almost 120 years since Makeham extended Gompertz’s efforts to find a simple mathematical law which would reflect the mortality experience of a group of lives and also simplify the calculation of monetary values. This article discusses a radically different approach, relating mortality improvements to economic condition, proposed by Kohler and Alcock in an article in the Journal of Peace Research, Vol XIII entitled Economic Law of Life.

Description: Synopsis of the report of the SOA Medical Effectiveness Task Force, which discusses the concept of health plan performance measurement and the contribution actuaries can make to this.

Description: This article discusses the effects of economic cycles on the health insurance business.

Description: Discusses management principles for the successful application of the underwriting processes of selecting and classifying risks and the actuarial pricing process of establishing adequate and equitable premiums for the risks to be underwritten within group medical business. Has some nice representative data for what a book of business might look like by case size.

Description: Book review on Standards for Discussion and Presentation of Errors in Survey and Census Data by the American Statistical Association, Washington, D.C., 1975. The material will be of interest to actuaries and of help in preparing their own study reports. The guidelines discuss some relatively simple means of presenting error estimates for published data.

Description: Detailed information about a Measurement Framework to evaluate existing designs and to illustrate how certain designs do or do not meet the fundamentals and where tradeoffs lie.

Description: The Committee on Economic Statistics of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries has recommended that the Institute sponsor an Economic Forecasting Board composed of actuaries and economists. Its role would be to develop formal projections of interest rates, inflation rates, productivity and wages. This article discusses the role of such a board, the purposes for the projections, and the potential roadblocks to accomplishing this.