This essay explores the nature and functions of the cambium maritimum contract in 17th- and 18th-century Genoa, examining it both as a mechanism for financing maritime trade and as a means of managing the risks inherent in navigation, while highlighting its remarkable adaptability across different contexts. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the contract, the study first analyses its legal framework through the writings of the leading Genoese jurists of the period, before investigating its various applications through a detailed examination of 300 notarial deeds from the years 1668, 1697, 1717, 1730 and 1765.
This article examines the historical and actuarial causes behind the decline of non-military Montepíos – public pension-paying institutions for civil servants in New Spain (early Mexico) – following the conclusion of the wars of independence in 1821. By combining historical, institutional and actuarial perspectives, it argues that their collapse resulted less from the fiscal and political turmoil of early independent Mexico than from their structural design flaws. These Montepíos operated as pay-as-you-go (PAYG), defined-benefits systems lacking mechanisms to balance contributions and payouts, leading to chronic underfunding. Through archival evidence and demographic data, this paper reveals a mismatch between short contribution periods and long deaccumulation periods, driven partly by gender and marriage patterns that extended the duration of survivor pensions. This study contributes to the understanding of how early welfare institutions in Spanish America anticipated the challenges of modern pension systems, demonstrating that institutional fragility often arises from the interaction between actuarial design and socio-demographic dynamics.
Social security, and old-age protection as one of its components, are key concerns for governments shaped by demographic ageing and economic pressures. The situation is further complicated by institutional fragmentation. This paper traces the historical evolution of Iranian social security, highlighting provisions for old-age pensions, demonstrating that the system operates through 18 active pension funds, each with its own legal framework, contribution rates, and benefit calculation formulas. Such fragmentation generates inequalities in retirement income, while inflation, demographic shifts and governance ambiguities further threaten sustainability. The study, primarily based on national documents and reviews, concludes that Iran’s pension system remains structurally vulnerable, requiring coherent reforms to ensure fairness, transparency and long-term financial viability.
We observe dynamic trends of increasing magnitude in natural disasters and climate-related damages, which ultimately lead to probability distribution functions with very fat tails. This implies a “race in the extreme tail between how rapidly probabilities are declining and how rapidly damages are increasing” [Weitzman, 2009, p. 1]. To cope with these significant long-term risks, characterised by a high degree of uncertainty and correlated events, standard economic instruments and insurance products are inadequate. Even the appeal to capital markets and the securitisation via ILS leads to a huge remaining protection gap. Therefore, either a very high level of capital reserves is needed (in the reserve theory of insurance) with all its associated problems, or an intergenerational allocation is called for, which can only be provided by the State or Mutual Insurance. The goal of this paper is to convince readers that mutual insurance is the only solution for coping with these disaster risks. It therefore starts with a short history of Mutual Insurance, gives a concise introduction to the Mutual Insurance Theory, and ends with an application of this theory to the risks and damages of climate change.
Ukraine’s movement towards European Union membership coincides with unprecedented wartime shocks to its insurance industry. This article analyses how post-war European integration – anchored in Solvency II, the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD), and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) – is reshaping Ukrainian insurance regulation, capitalisation and innovation capacity. Using 2017–2025 market data and recent legislative acts, the study identifies drivers of regulatory convergence, assesses their impact on market structure, and puts forward policy recommendations for a sustainable recovery.Insurance is pivotal for post-war economic resilience in Ukraine, yet it remains one of the country’s least penetrated financial subsectors. European integration offers a regulatory blueprint to rebuild confidence, attract foreign investment, and accelerate InsurTech diffusion. However, compliance costs, capital shortfalls, and wartime risk exposures pose formidable hurdles. Grounded in the author’s doctoral research on innovative insurance market development and informed by a forthcoming conference presentation on the impact of EU integration, this paper bridges academic insight and applied policy analysis.
