The effective delivery of healthcare services is vital to the general welfare and well-being of a country's citizens. Financial infrastructure and policy reform can play a significant role in optimizing existing healthcare programs. Health Economics and Healthcare Reform: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a comprehensive source of academic material on the importance of economic structures and policy reform initiatives in modern healthcare systems. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as clinical costing, patient engagement, and e-health, this book is ideally designed for medical practitioners, researchers, professionals, and students interested in the optimization of healthcare delivery.

This book encourages insurance companies and regulators to explore offering Islamic insurance to boost the insurance industry in India. The distinctive features of Takaful also make it appealing even to non-Muslims. According to the 2012 World Takaful Report, India has immense potential for Takaful is based on the size of its Muslim population and the growth of its economy. However, it is surprising that Takaful has yet to be introduced in India since it has been offered in non-majority Muslim countries, such as Singapore, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. When the concept and practice of Takaful are examined, it is free from interest, uncertainty, and gambling. These are the main elements prohibited in Islam. However, it has been evidenced that these elements are also banned in teaching other religions believed by the Indians. Given this landscape, this book fills the gap in research on the viability of Takaful in India, focusing on its empirical aspects by examining the perception of Indian insurance operators toward Takaful.

The emergence of artificial intelligence has created a vast amount of advancements within various professional sectors and has transformed the way organizations conduct themselves. The implementation of intelligent systems has assisted with developing traditional processes including decision making, risk management, and security. An area that requires significant attention and research is how these companies are becoming accustomed to computer intelligence and applying this technology to their everyday practices. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Risk Management and Cyber Intelligence is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of intelligent systems within various professional sectors as well as the exploration of theories and empirical findings. While highlighting topics such as decision making, cognitive science, and knowledge management, this publication explores the management of risk and uncertainty using training exercises, as well as the development of managerial intelligence competency. This book is ideally designed for practitioners, educators, researchers, policymakers, managers, developers, analysts, politicians, and students seeking current research on modern approaches to the analysis and performance of cyber intelligence.

As health care concerns grow in the U.S., medical anthropologist Linda M. Whiteford and social psychologist Larry G. Branch present their findings on a health care anomaly, from an unlikely source. Primary Health Care in Cuba examines the highly successful model of primary health care in Cuba following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. This model, developed during a time of dramatic social and political change, created a preventive care system to better provide equity access to health care. Cuba's recognition as a paragon of health care has earned praise from the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Pan American Health Organization. In this book, Whiteford and Branch explore the successes of Cuba's preventive primary health care system and its contribution to global health.

Eliminate frustration and confusion about the value of Life Insurance policies. This approachable book reveals the costs and benefits of various types of life insurance policies, annuities and investment options.

Whether you are thinking about entering the contract cleaning business, have a young company that may be struggling to get to the next level, or have a mature organization that may need to look at things in a different light, this book is for you. From naming your company to selling your company, this book covers all the bases. Dick takes you through the mistakes he made when starting his company, to the stumbling he did along the way, and how he got up and kept going. Some of his real life stories will amuse while others will make you sit back and take note of how you can make a correction in your company that can save or earn lots of dollars for you. Dick includes ways to approach a banker, attorney, accountant, insurance agent as well as the supplier of your cleaning products and equipment. Doing these things right will put money on your bottom line, doing them wrong may put you out of business in a hurry. Not to be forgotton, he also includes a chapter on preparing your company for sale. Dick sold his company and can provide helpful suggestions on what you need to do and not do to be ready to sell. Dick interjects humor along the way to emphasize some of his mistakes and what he learned from them. You will particularly want to read chapter 18 where he talkes about his favorite sayings and how they affected him. In that same chapter he also talks about actual calls he took from employees calling in to report they would not be at work and how he handled the calls. Last but not least, he provides you his thoughts on how to focus on becoming a leader as well as what he envisons the characteristics of real success are. This book is designed as a working tool. It is written in conversational style and will provide you a true encloypedia for being in the contract cleaning business. Enjoy and learn.

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"(Wright and Smith) have written a remarkably lucid and elegantly organized history that keeps the major themes in view, even while discussing the minutiae of crafting and marketing various new insurance products or of managing the firm and its investment portfolio. As the authors themselves point out, the history of life insurance has not attracted much serious scholarship or inspired writing. Fortunately, Mutually Beneficial has both. It integrates the Guardian's career into a wider account of the American life-insurance business and American economic history more generally, and it manages to do so with a light touch."
--Geoffrey Clark, "Harvard Business History Review"

"(Mutually Beneficial is), without doubt, a major contribution to the economics and history of life insurance in the twentieth century. Wright and Smith have provided, for example, the most comprehensive account yet of product development, and the section on investment strategies is also important. In sum this will make a fine addition to the library of insurance historians, and to financial and business historians more generally."
--Robin Pearson, "Accounting, Business & Financial History"

"The matieral is well documented. The authors have produced a nonvanity company history that goes behind the scenes to describe the company's corporate culture and policies and provide a explanation of how ethical and business precepts have led to consistent profitability."
--"Enterprise & Society"

Mutually Beneficial tells the story of the evolution of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, one of the most important life and health insurers inthe history of the U.S. economy and life insurance industry. Relying on exclusive access to the company's archives, interviews with its current executive officers, the public record, and scholarly articles and monographs, Robert E. Wright and George David Smith provide a strategic analysis of Guardian, from its founding to its standing in the insurance world today.

Mutually Beneficial also describes the origin of Guardian's distinctive approach to business-its corporate culture and policy-and how these principles flow from the ethical and business precepts of its founders. By rigorously attending to its policyholders as a matter of practice as well as principle, Guardian has long been one of the most consistently profitable life insurance firms as measured by return on net wealth. This unique history will be of interest to anyone in the insurance business, as well as financial and economic professionals.

This volume features a selection of contributions presented at the 2019 Wroclaw Conference in Finance, covering a wide range of topics in finance and financial economics, e.g. financial markets; monetary policy; corporate, personal and public finance; and risk management and insurance. Reflecting the diversity and richness of research in the field, the papers discuss both fundamental and applied finance, and offer a detailed analysis of current financial-market problems, including specifics of the Polish and Central European markets. They also examine the results of advanced financial modeling. Accordingly, the proceedings offer a valuable resource for researchers at universities and policy institutions, as well as graduate students and practitioners in economics and finance at both private and government organizations.

We seem to be living at a time when insurance is strained to the breaking point. From hurricanes and earthquakes to terrorist attacks and threats of nuclear devastation, enormous risks to life and property - and accompanying liabilities - proliferate on an unprecedented scale. Insurer insolvency is not yet common, but it is not unusual either. And at the root of such failures often lies the compound failure of uncollectable reinsurance. This book proposes that a significant part of the emerging insurance crisis results from inadequate regulation of reinsurance. In a detailed and cogent analysis of what an effective regulatory regime for reinsurance must entail, the author examines such factors as the following: direct supervision of reinsurers versus supervision of reinsurance policies; models from developed countries (US, UK, EU) and international organizations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Association of Insurance Supervisors); the importance of taking legal and economic differences into account while applying models; the problem of local protectionism, especially in developing countries; the dismantling of trade barriers in the reinsurance industry; global harmonization of reinsurance regulation; the role of reinsurance intermediaries; finite risk reinsurance; and insurance-linked securities. The author's concluding chapter presents an essential legal infrastructure that allows for efficiency, security, and individual market characteristics. Professor Wang then applies this framework to the Taiwanese insurance market, demonstrating convincingly how his proposed regime can solve specific problems while respecting Taiwan's distinct market environment.

This book provides a thorough understanding of the fundamental concepts of financial mathematics essential for the evaluation of any financial product and instrument. Mastering concepts of present and future values of streams of cash flows under different interest rate environments is core for actuaries and financial economists. This book covers the body of knowledge required by the Society of Actuaries (SOA) for its Financial Mathematics (FM) Exam.The third edition includes major changes such as an addition of an 'R Laboratory' section in each chapter, except for Chapter 9. These sections provide R codes to do various computations, which will facilitate students to apply conceptual knowledge. Additionally, key definitions have been revised and the theme structure has been altered. Students studying undergraduate courses on financial mathematics for actuaries will find this book useful. This book offers numerous examples and exercises, some of which are adapted from previous SOA FM Exams. It is also useful for students preparing for the actuarial professional exams through self-study.

This handbook examines the latest techniques and strategies that are used to unlock the risk transfer capacity of global financial and capital markets. Taking the financial crisis and global recession into account, it frames and contextualises non-traditional risk transfer tools created over the last 20 years. Featuring contributions from distinguished academics and professionals from around the world, this book covers in detail issues in securitization, financial risk management and innovation, structured finance and derivatives, life and non-life pure risk management, market and financial reinsurance, CAT risk management, crisis management, natural, environmental and man-made risks, terrorism risk, risk modelling, vulnerability and resilience. This handbook will be of interest to academics, researchers and practitioners in the field of risk transfer.

Finance and insurance companies are facing a wide range of parametric statistical problems. Statistical experiments generated by a sample of independent and identically distributed random variables are frequent and well understood, especially those consisting of probability measures of an exponential type. However, the aforementioned applications also offer non-classical experiments implying observation samples of independent but not identically distributed random variables or even dependent random variables. Three examples of such experiments are treated in this book. First, the Generalized Linear Models are studied. They extend the standard regression model to non-Gaussian distributions. Statistical experiments with Markov chains are considered next. Finally, various statistical experiments generated by fractional Gaussian noise are also described. In this book, asymptotic properties of several sequences of estimators are detailed. The notion of asymptotical efficiency is discussed for the different statistical experiments considered in order to give the proper sense of estimation risk. Eighty examples and computations with R software are given throughout the text.

This book presents startling evidence that state monopolies can produce better outcomes than the free market. It provides an empirical comparison of the property insurance market in five European countries: Britain, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany. The market and cost structures of insurers in each country are described, and particular features of each market and the outcomes for customers examined. The regulatory frameworks vary widely from country to country and so do the market outcomes, both in terms of premium level and in terms of available insurance cover. In view of the increase in major floods and other forms of natural damage (such as subsidence) over the last decades, the non-availability of insurance cover in many competitive insurance systems is likely to become a major political issue. This book shows that state monopoly is an adequate policy response. Competitive insurance systems are shown to provide incomplete cover at a substantially higher cost. In mixed systems, where the private sector can obtain reinsurance from the state (such a system is being tried in France) the state tends to end up paying most of the costs (it reinsures most of the bad risks) while the private insurance companies keep most of the premium income. The book will be of interest to academic economists interested in privatization, regulation, the theory of the firm, and insurance; Policy-makers concerned with regulation and privatization; Insurance companies, regulators, and analysts.

With a foreword by Gabriel Bernardino, Chairman of EIOPASolvency II (Directive 2009/138/EC ) regulates the solvency requirements for EU insurers and reinsurers. It aims to reduce the risk that an insurer would be unable to meet claims, to provide early warning to supervisors so that they can intervene promptly if capital falls below the required level, and to promote confidence in the financial stability of the insurance sector. Solvency II not only sets out the capital requirements to guarantee policyholder protection, but also includes measures to stimulate risk management and good governance and to improve transparency.This book provides a thorough and well-structured overview of the regulatory regime and how it will affect insurers, re-insurers and other market participants, including policyholders. The author, who was closely involved in the making of Solvency II, offers all the necessary insights and explanations to better understand the new solvency regime. While Solvency I only sets basic solvency standards, Solvency II is more sophisticated introducing a risk based solvency capital regime and modernising EU insurance regulation thus putting much emphasis on high quality prudential supervision. This improves the protection of policyholders, creates an incentive for good risk management, recognizes the economic reality of a group, establishes market transparency and provides for a modern risk based supervisory regime, in short, as the book's subtitle already suggests, Solvency II is good for you.Solvency Requirements for EU Insurers provides a unique insight into the complex world of insurance and will be useful to risk managers, actuaries, accountants, lawyers, board members of (re) insurance companies, insurance intermediaries, consultants, regulators, supervisors, academics, students and, more generally, all those involved with or interested in insurance and in the operation of the insurance market.

This informative volume synthesizes the literatures on health economics, risk management, and health services into a concise guide to the financial and social basics of health insurance with an eye to its wide-scale upgrade. Its scope takes in concepts of health capital, strengths and limitations of insurance models, the effectiveness of coverage and services, and the roles of healthcare providers and government agencies in the equation. Coverage surveys the current state of group and public policies, most notably the effects of the Affordable Care Act on insurers and consumers and the current interest in universal coverage and single-payer plans. Throughout, the author provides systemic reasons to explain why today's health insurance fails so many consumers, concluding with reality-based recommendations for making insurance more valuable to both today's market and consumer well-being. Included among the topics: *Defining health insurance and healthcare finance. *Consuming and investing in health. *The scope of health insurance and its constraints. *Matching health insurance supply and demand. *The role of government in health insurance. *Ongoing challenges and the future of health insurance. Bringing a needed degree of objectivity to often highly subjective material, What Is Health Insurance (Good) For? is a call to reform to be read by health insurance researchers (including risk management insurance and health services research), professionals, practitioners, and policymakers.

This book, unique in its composition, reviews the academic empirical literature on how CDSs actually work in practice, including during distressed times of market crises. It also discusses the mechanics of single-name and index CDSs, the theoretical costs and benefits of CDSs, as well as comprehensively summarizes the empirical evidence on important aspects of these instruments of risk transfer. Full-time academics, researchers at financial institutions, and students will benefit from the dispassionate and comprehensive summary of the academic literature; they can read this book instead of identifying, collecting, and reading the hundreds of academic articles on the important subject of credit risk transfer using derivatives and benefit from the synthesis of the literature provided.