Surveying the Role of Actuary in Social Security System (Emphasizing the Social Insurance Sub-system)

This study explains the role of actuary in social security system, especially in its social Insurance sub-system. The main question of this article is: How actuary, as a technical means, can contribute to the improvement of performance in social security system. For answering this question, first, we try to construct a formal analytical model based on abstract theories of functionalism, especially on the basis of Talcott Parsons theory. According to this model, if the performance of a system is going to be improved, the system should be aware of its own internal order requirements, the impacts of macro-social-order and other sub-systems on the system itself. If a social system can continuously consider the aforementioned issues in its own structure, it will experience the improvement of performance. In the second part of this article, we try to show that how actuary and its four activities in social security system (evaluation of the existing insurance plans, evaluation of a new insurance plan, proposing reforms, short-term forecasts) can structurally convert the social security system to a “social-based functional order” which is always sensitive to its internal order and macro-social-order. In this way, the internal disorder will be prevented.