The last paper submitted to the Institute on the special problems arising from the transaction of overseas life business was that submitted by W. F. Gardner in 1935 (J.I.A. 66, 198). The expansion since that date in overseas life business justifies a further review of these problems. In 1935 the revenue premium income (other than annuity purchase money) from the overseas business of British life offices as recorded in the Board of Trade Returns was some £6.4 million, representing 7.9% of the total ordinary branch premium income of British life offices; in 1954 the premium income from overseas business was £34.4 million and represented 12.3% of the total.

The Council of the Institute decided that ‘a Working Party be set up to advise the Council on the actuarial and other problems arising in connexion with the transferability of pension rights’. The Council of the Faculty accepted the Institute's invitation to be associated with the project and we were appointed to be the members of the Working Party.

2. In considering the subject remitted to us, we quickly formed the view that the description preservation of pension rights is more apt than transferability of pension rights, for the transfer of pension rights from one scheme to another when a member changes his employment is only one of several methods of preserving the whole or part of his accrued pension rights. We have accordingly used the term preservation in preference to transferability throughout this report.

3. We have confined our attention to the question of preservation of pension rights as it concerns individual members of pension schemes who change their employment, as distinct from the problem that arises when groups of members are transferred with the work they do from one employment to another, as they were, for example, on a large scale when the nationalized industries were set up; in such cases other problems arise.

This paper stems from a suggestion that it would be worth while to bring to the notice of the profession the progress which has been made and the statistical problems that have arisen in the study of epidemiology in its wider sense, viz. the study, not merely of the spread of communicable disease as was formerly implied by this term, but of the natural history of disease; its prevalence, causation, symptomology and prognosis. It would, however, require a series of papers to cover so wide a field and would demand medical as well as statistical competence. It therefore seemed advisable to use the more restrictive title chosen in order to emphasize the fact that, in the main, consideration is devoted to statistical rather than to clinical aspects.

In recent years an unusually high proportion of the papers submitted to the Institute and to the Faculty have dealt with technical problems of life assurance management. The subjects covered include investment policy, valuation and bonus policy, the relationship between liabilities and assets and the relative merits of with-profit and without-profit business. The object of this paper is to indicate how these various subjects (with the addition of new-business policy) react on each other and to consider how far any over-all actuarial planning is possible, special regard being paid to modern developments in the different fields. Some repetition of what has already been said in recent years is inevitable, but no attempt will be made to summarize actuarial opinion on the topics under review, a task which would be impossible within the scope of the paper.