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It is quite possible that financial institutions including life insurance companies would encounter turbulent situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic before policies mature. Constructing models that can generate scenarios for major assets to cover abrupt changes in financial markets is thus essential for the financial institution's risk management.

The key issues in such modeling include how to manage the large number of risk factors involved, how to model the dynamics of chosen or derived factors and how to incorporate relations among these factors. The authors propose the orthogonal ARMA–GARCH (autoregressive moving-average–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) approach to tackle these issues. The constructed economic scenario generation (ESG) models pass the backtests covering the period from the beginning of 2018 to the end of May 2020, which includes the turbulent situations caused by COVID-19.

The backtesting covering the turbulent period of COVID-19, along with fan charts and comparisons on simulated and historical statistics, validates our approach.

This paper is the first one that attempts to generate complex long-term economic scenarios for a large-scale portfolio from its large dimensional covariance matrix estimated by the orthogonal ARMA–GARCH model.

Several contradictions emerge in the ways in which Generation Z in Italy is, on the one hand, represented in public arenas and common sense and, on the other, when we look to the issues they face in confronting the socio-economic structure around them. This chapter specifically situates these emerging representations within the socio-economic scenario Generation Z lives in. We do this by interrogating statistical data – mainly ISTAT and Instituto Toniolo dataset. The overall picture sees Generation Z as not sharply different from the Millennials: it is a generation for which some structural constraints have been revealed already, but in respect to which they will face sharper conditions. Overall, we argue that statistical sources suggest that Generation Z is less worried about its future than it could be. The impact of the relative protective shell in which young people of this age find themselves has a role in this: one that is very much embedded in Italian culture and tradition. We conclude the chapter by conveying the idea that current Generation Z seems to be living in a soap bubble. By this we mean that the protection they enjoy and the somewhat positiveness with which they look at their future are due to disappear once they are constrained to deal with their responsibility outside of the family protection, in private life and in the labour market. Therefore the bubble that we see is specifically a soap bubble, given that it is likely to dissolve itself soon.

Crime against elderly people is a matter of grave concern in contemporary India. Today, they are being attacked with grievous harm, murder, and abusive behaviour by known and unknown persons. These cases have certainly had a negative impact on their way of life and sense of well-being. Consequently, fear of crime is being recognised as an emerging social problem among the elderly population in India. The purpose of this paper is to examine different types of crime that are being committed against the elderly, leading to a fear of crime. And, to identify the victim offender relationship.

A mixed method approach has been applied in this paper. This study has been designed as an exploratory lead-in to a planned wider study. It examines the factors shaping the victimisation experience of the elderly. The study has been conducted from October 2012 to January 2013 on a sample of 220 elderly people living in both rural and urban areas of Lucknow in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India.

The findings suggest that emotional crime is a major problem among the elderly and more prevalent than crime against the body and property. The study has also found that elderly people have a fear of crime in their own houses due to victimisation.

This is an original paper, which is based on the experiences of elderly people living in Indian society and discussed the impact of prior victimisation.

Population ageing, extended coverage of beneficiaries and rise in benefit levels of a public-funded universal social pension scheme (USPS) for elderly individuals may exert fiscal pressures on India’s General Government. Using accounting frameworks, this paper aims at an assessment of public expenditure requirements of USPS scenarios in the short term and their long-term implications for fiscal sustainability.

Short-term public expenditure requirements are quantified for the current pension scheme and proposed USPS scenarios, if pension benefits are adjustable for official poverty line, per capita income, the inflation rate and income elasticity of public pension expenditure. Long-term fiscal sustainability is determined by the methodology of generational accounting.

Public expenditure requirements for the USPS scenarios are remarkably higher as compared to the current expenditure on the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAPS). Short-term analyses offer economic justifications for an increase in pension benefits either by a single adjustment factor or combined adjustment factors but at a cost of remarkable increase in public expenditure requirements. Long-term analyses show that the IGNOAPS and proposed USPS scenarios are fiscally sustainable but sensitive to five parameters (productivity growth, inflation rate, discount rate, income elasticity public pension expenditure and income elasticity of health expenditure). A policy mix of these parameters leads to fiscal sustainability of the IGNOAPS and proposed USPS scenarios with differential impacts on inter-generational distribution of welfare by tax and transfer adjustments.

Application of the generational accounting methodology is new for India’s pension economics and may have applicability and relevance for future extensions and analyses of other fiscal policy issues. This paper sets a benchmark for such extensions and applications.

The analyses and implications offer economic justifications for increase in levels of pension benefits by the current pension scheme and proposed USPS scenarios, introduction of sustainable USPS scenarios under current fiscal policies and choice of design parameters for a fiscally sustainable USPS.

Social pensions have implications for providing income security and livelihood benefits for all elderly civilians in society.

The paper adds to the existing knowledge on economic analyses and fiscal implications of India’s old age pension policies in general and social pension policies in particular. Subject to the comparability of socio-economic structures and pension programmes, the methodology and public policy analyses of this paper may be of relevance and applicability for developing countries in Asia.

The life insurance industry has been exposed to high levels of longevity risk born from the mismatch between realized mortality trends and anticipated forecast. Annuity providers are exposed to extended periods of annuity payments. There are no immediate instruments in the market to counter the risk directly. This paper aims to develop appropriate instruments for hedging longevity risk and providing an insight on how existing products can be tailor-made to effectively immunize portfolios consisting of life insurance using a cointegration vector error correction model with regime-switching (RS-VECM), which enables both short-term fluctuations, through the autoregressive structure [AR(1)] and long-run equilibria using a cointegration relationship. The authors also develop synthetic products that can be used to effectively hedge longevity risk faced by life insurance and annuity providers who actively hold portfolios of life insurance products. Models are derived using South African data. The authors also derive closed-form expressions for hedge ratios associated with synthetic products written on life insurance contracts as this will provide a natural way of immunizing the associated portfolios. The authors further show how to address the current liquidity challenges in the longevity market by devising longevity swaps and develop pricing and hedging algorithms for longevity-linked securities. The use of a cointergrating relationship improves the model fitting process, as all the VECMs and RS-VECMs yield greater criteria values than their vector autoregressive model (VAR) and regime-switching vector autoregressive model (RS-VAR) counterpart’s, even though there are accruing parameters involved.

The market model adopted from Ngai and Sherris (2011) is a cointegration RS-VECM for this enables both short-term fluctuations, through the AR(1) and long-run equilibria using a cointegration relationship (Johansen, 1988, 1995a, 1995b), with a heteroskedasticity through the use of regime-switching. The RS-VECM is seen to have the best fit for Australian data under various model selection criteria by Sherris and Zhang (2009). Harris (1997) (Sajjad et al., 2008) also fits a regime-switching VAR model using Australian (UK and US) data to four key macroeconomic variables (market stock indices), showing that regime-switching is a significant improvement over autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) and generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) processes in the account for volatility, evidence similar to that of Sherris and Zhang (2009) in the case of Exponential Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ERCH). Ngai and Sherris (2011) and Sherris and Zhang (2009) also fit a VAR model to Australian data with simultaneous regime-switching across many economic and financial series.

The authors develop a longevity swap using nighttime data instead of usual income measures as it yields statistically accurate results. The authors also develop longevity derivatives and annuities including variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit (GLWB) and inflation-indexed annuities. Improved market and mortality models are developed and estimated using South African data to model the underlying risks. Macroeconomic variables dependence is modeled using a cointegrating VECM as used in Ngai and Sherris (2011), which enables both short-run dependence and long-run equilibrium. Longevity swaps provide protection against longevity risk and benefit the most from hedging longevity risk. Longevity bonds are also effective as a hedging instrument in life annuities. The cost of hedging, as reflected in the price of longevity risk, has a statistically significant effect on the effectiveness of hedging options.

This study relied on secondary data partly reported by independent institutions and the government, which may be biased because of smoothening, interpolation or extrapolation processes.

An examination of South Africa’s mortality based on industry experience in comparison to population mortality would demand confirmation of the analysis in this paper based on Belgian data as well as other less developed economies. This study shows that to provide inflation-indexed life annuities, there is a need for an active market for hedging inflation in South Africa. This would demand the South African Government through the help of Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA) to issue inflation-indexed securities which will help annuities and insurance providers immunize their portfolios from longevity risk.

In South Africa, there is an infant market for inflation hedging and no market for longevity swaps. The effect of not being able to hedge inflation is guaranteed, and longevity swaps in annuity products is revealed to be useful and significant, particularly using developing or emerging economies as a laboratory. This study has shown that government issuance or allowing issuance, of longevity swaps, can enable insurers to manage longevity risk. If the South African Government, through ASSA, is to develop a projected mortality reference index for South Africa, this would allow the development of mortality-linked securities and longevity swaps which ultimately maximize the social welfare of life assurance policy holders.

The paper proposes longevity swaps and static hedging because they are simple, less costly and practical with feasible applications to the South African market, an economy of over 50 million people. As the market for MLS develops further, dynamic hedging should become possible.

In 2008, a number of Southern African countries cultivated about 900,000 ha of Jatropha, with a number of biodiesel plants ready for production; however, none of the projects succeeded. In 2014, KiOR advanced biofuel Energy Company in the USA announced bankruptcy due to incompetent technology. Studies disclose that the reasons for biofuel plants failure are not only due to lack of incentives and unclear policies but also due to lack of economic feasibility and low production yields. This paper aims to review the techno-economy assessment of second-generation biofuel technologies. The purpose of this paper is to summarize specific techno-economic indicators such as production cost, technology efficiency and process life cycle analysis for advanced biofuel technology and to narrate and illustrate a clear view of what requires assessment to deploy a feasible advanced biofuel technology. This study also reviews assessment of biomass supply chain, feedstock availability and site selection criteria. The review also elaborates on the use of different processes, forecasting and simulation-modeling tools used in different techno-economic analysis studies. The review provides guidance for conducting a technical and economic feasibility study for the advanced biofuels energy business.

The aim of this review is, therefore, to evaluate the techno-economic feasibility studies for the establishment of viable industrial scale production of second-generation biofuels. It does so by grouping studies based on technology selection, feedstock availability and suitability, process simulation and economies as well as technology environmental impact assessment.

In conclusion, techno-economic analysis tools offer researchers insight in terms of where their research and development should focus, to attain the most significant enhancement for the economics of a technology. The study patterns within the scope of techno-economics of advanced biofuel reveal that there is no generic answer as to which technology would be feasible at a commercial scale. It is therefore important to keep in mind that models can only simplify and give a simulation of reality to a certain extent. Nevertheless, reviewed studies do not reach the same results, but some results are logically similar.

The originality of this article specifically illustrates important technical and economic indicators that should be considered when conducting feasibility studies for advance biofuels.

This paper aims to quantify the potentials for the development of combined heat and power (CHP) in Europe.

To this end, it uses the TIMES-EU energy-economic model and assesses the impact of key policy options and targets in the area of CO₂ emissions reduction, renewable energies and energy efficiency improvements. The results are also compared with the cogeneration potentials as reported by the Member States in their national reports.

The paper shows that CHP output could be more than doubled and that important CHP penetration potential exists in expanding the European district heating systems. This result is even more pronounced with the far-reaching CO₂ emissions reduction necessary in order to meet a long-term 2 degree target. Nevertheless, the paper also shows that strong CO₂ emission reductions in the energy sector might limit the CHP potential due to increased competition for biomass with the transport sector.

Given the proven socio-economic benefits of using CHP, the paper identifies the areas for future research in order to better exploit the potential of this technology such as the combination of CHP and district cooling or country- and industry-specific options to generate process heat.

Southern California Edison decided to plan for future uncertainties by writing a series of plausible scenarios and preparing flexible responses for each of them.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.