This paper reviews the present statutory valuation method and regime. It discusses the usefulness and effectiveness of the method in relation to the current range of insurance contracts. It suggests a possible alternative approach to statutory valuation which could enable offices to demonstrate both their solvency and their ability to meet policyholders' reasonable expectations. It reviews the effects of introducing the suggested method and its relationship with other current reporting issues.

In the current financial climate takeovers of proprietary life companies by other life companies, amalgamations of mutuals and demutualisations have become more and more prevalent. However in respect of takeovers, the process does not end with the purchase, but normally results in the transfer of the long-term business of one of the companies to the other. To optimise synergy and administrative efficiency, there may be a need to reconstruct the amalgamated funds.

The author has been involved as Appointed Actuary and internal project manager in such transfers of business within proprietary companies and has also acted as an independent actuary and as an external project manager for other transfers. One of these transfers involved four companies transacting both with-profits and unit-linked business in which the interests of both policyholders and shareholder had to be protected. He considered this transfer to be of sufficient interest to merit the preparation of a paper discussing the issues which arose. Although the paper is principally based on that transfer as a case study, relevant and related factors arising in other transfers have been included where appropriate, as have references to the role of the actuary before, during and after reconstruction.

In the case study, the scheme of transfer and the associated reconstruction of corporate structure involved merging three separate with-profits funds, merging many unit-linked funds (including unitised with-profits) and, subject to appropriate compensation, rationalisation of the rights to surplus attributable to both with-profits policyholders and shareholder.

Counting processes and their compensators are introduced at a heuristic level. The martingale property of stochastic integrals with respect to a compensated counting process leads to moment estimates and asymptotic normal distributions for statistics arising in multiple state, non-parametric and semi-parametric models. The place of survival models in actuarial education is discussed.

In this paper we use a case study of a non-life insurance portfolio to demonstrate how recent research in ruin theory can be applied to solvency problems. By approximating the aggregate claims distribution for the portfolio by a translated gamma distribution, we estimate ruin probabilities through a recursive procedure when the insurer earns investment income on its surplus. We also show the results of applying simulation techniques to this problem, and discuss some advantages and disadvantages of simulation as a means of assessing ruin probabilities. Finally we discuss the calculation of the probability of ruin at the end of a specified time period.

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 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.