The authors discuss the investment of pension and other institutional funds. stressing a theme of investing to meet liabilities. Their aim is to stimulate debate by actuaries and the investment community, leading to the development of better approaches to pension fund investment and its monitoring.

The first part of the paper considers the matching of assets to liabilities, concentrating on a major principle applicable to actuarial valuations where assets and liabilities are mismatched.

The paper goes on to consider principles of institutional investment and includes discussions of the meaning and measurement of risk, the setting of investment objectives, decision-making, asset allocation and investment performance monitoring.

The current state of knowledge on the epidemiology of HIV infection and AIDS is reviewed, with extensive references to the medical literature. The particular focus is on those aspects of the epidemiology of HIV infection which are of interest in the formulation of models for projecting the future spread of the virus and its impact in terms of numbers of cases of AIDS and deaths from AIDS.

In AIDS Bulletins Nos. 1 to 4 the Institute of Actuaries AIDS Working Party presented projections of HIV infection and AIDS based on a model developed by Wilkie. This paper explores the sensitivity of those projections to the various different assumptions which have to be made and presents results on a number of alternative sets of assumptions.

The ‘law of mortality’ proposed by Heligman and Pollard is compared with the law of Gompertz and with English Life Table No. 14. Some new mathematical results are derived, including specific equations for the curve of deaths. Some numerical illustrations are given.

This note continues a regular series on mortality rates in Great Britain, showing the mortality experienced in each age-group in 1988 and comparing this for broad age-groups, on a standardised basis, with mortality in earlier years.