Description: Just in the recent two years, COVID-19 has demonstrated very impressively that a pandemic is not something for which one can fully prepare. However, what makes a pandemic so special and difficult to manage compared to other low frequency and high severity events such as volcanic eruptions or tsunami damage? Frank Schillerexplains what makes a pandemic so different, viz, information uncertainty, exponential growth, and time lags.

Description: Overview of guest editorials and special issues in the Annals of Actuarial Science, dealing with great societal challenges that the actuarial profession is responding to.

Description: The IFRS Foundation’s establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board is a major step toward achieving relevant, decision-useful sustainability information for market participants that is comparable across industries and jurisdictions.

Description: Exploration of the relationship between insuretech and reinsurance in Life and P&C

Description: The big event of 2023 is the launch of multiple Humira biosimilars, which began in January with the arrival of Amgen’s Amjevita on the market. The launch of Amjevita kicks off the process of changing the specialty drug marketplace in the United States. The expectation of the full impact of this big event is very hopeful, but there is still uncertainty several months after its beginning. Humira is the highest-selling drug in the world and has been since 2013 (Figure 1)—except for when COVID-19 projects temporarily surpassed it. The world is eagerly awaiting the launch of multiple biosimilar drugs to compete with Humira and hopefully bring more competitive pricing to the benefit of payers and patients everywhere.

Description: In 2020, the Korean insurance regulator, Financial Services Commission (FSC), introduced a coinsurance structure allowing for full risk transfer—including investment risk, interest rate risk, insurance risk, and policyholder lapse risk—as a permitted practice. Expanding use of coinsurance in the Korean insurance market brings a suite of potential benefits to Korean insurance companies including increased financial flexibility, options to improve policyholder protection and shareholder value through optimization of business strategies. As such, FSC’s initiative and intention to introduce coinsurance opportunities to the market is commendable.

Description: Cell and Gene Therapy (CGT) are life-changing treatments where conditions such as cancer, hemophilia, spinal muscular atrophy and blindness are being cured. These are great for individuals and society, but the treatment costs are expensive which is bad for payers and reinsurers. This article explores ways for health reinsurance actuaries to participate in the space and evaluate the risk associated with these treatments

Description: In this article we provide a market overview of these three living benefit riders, discuss key product development and pricing considerations, explore the advantages of offering many living benefit riders on a single life insurance policy, and review considerations when filing these products for review and approval for entering the market.

Description: Many countries have suffered the ups and downs of the COVID-19pandemic, and Mexico is no exception. Even worse, in contrast withEuropean countries that saw numbers dip during the summer of2020, Mexico did not. A first peak was reached at the end of July2020, then a slight decrease in the following two months. SinceOctober, Mexico has experienced the worst increasing trend of thewhole epidemic. In this article, Arturo Erdely, a professor of actuarialscience, explains this increase.

Description: In this paper, we shine a light on the global public health epidemic of intimate partner violence (IPV). This first paper presents background information on the problem with a focus on health and economic impacts for the actuarial audience