The development of the Polish insurance market in the period since liberalisation is discussed. The nature of the investment market and the investment risk faced by insurers are analysed in the context of the liability structure of Polish insurance companies. The likely future developments in insurance and investment markets are outlined, particularly given the structure of the state social insurance system, possible reforms of which are discussed in detail.

The bias inherent in select mortality investigations where data are grouped by coincident or non-coincident rate intervals is analysed and compared. The key to the bias is shown to be the particular patterns of non-uniform ‘exposure frequency’ inherent in each method. It is shown that the bias using the non-coincident rate intervals is sensitive to a non-uniform distribution of new entrants by age, while the use of coincident rate intervals is sensitive to making appropriate assumptions regarding the distribution of policy anniversaries over life-time, p(s). Under both methods a significant proportion of the bias is retained after graduation. It is shown that non-coincident rate intervals may be preferred where p(s) is unknown, as in the CMI Bureau's investigations, while coincident rate intervals would be preferred where p(s) is known and taken into account in deriving the age for the estimated rates.

Deaths and exposures by individual calendar year and individual years of age for the U.K. male assured lives experience over the recent past are comprehensively modelled using generalised linear modelling techniques. Our principal objective is to develop a model which incorporates both the age variation in mortality and the underlying time trends in the mortality rates. The approach has considerable advantages over ad hoc methods of fitting parametric models to represent the age variation in mortality and then separately attempting to represent the time trends in the parameters of these models. The approach advocated can be seen as an extension to the conventional parametric graduation techniques used by the CMI Bureau to represent trends in mortality.

The European Community 3rd Life and Insurance Accounts Directives have necessitated changes to United Kingdom life insurers' statutory solvency valuations and published accounts. This paper details these, together with associated guidance. It also describes certain other developments in U.K. life office financial reporting and discusses some inter-professional issues.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a methodology for determining an appropriate structure for time-series models of inflation rates, short-term and long-term interest rates, dividend growth rates, dividend yields, rental growth rates and rental yields and to demonstrate the application of that methodology to the development of a model based on South African data. It is suggested that the methodology used in this paper may be applied to other economic environments.

The provision of graduated mortality rates, for the United Kingdom pensioners' experience, based on the so-called ‘amounts’ data sets is addressed. Specifically a methodology is investigated, building on the existing methods practiced by the CMI Bureau, which takes a more detailed account of the underlying structure of the data involved. The method is applied to the U.K. pensioners' experience and recent mortality trends in this experience revealed.

This paper considers the variety of social security and complementary pension scheme arrangements which have developed in different countries, and examines some recent trends in pension reforms, designed to address the problem of the ageing population and other structural shortcomings in existing structures.

Consolidation of FT-SE Actuaries share indices, and of revised 1994 Industrial Classification system. New Fledgling Index.