Farid Flici

About

I am a Senior Research Fellow at CREAD (Algiers) and a Visiting Researcher at LSHTM (London), specializing in actuarial demography. My research focuses on the implications of demographic change for the financial sustainability of social protection systems, alongside work on migrant mortality and health in high-income countries. I integrate actuarial science, demography, and data science to address policy-relevant challenges. My work is published in international peer-reviewed journals, presented at leading conferences, and contributes to evidence-based policymaking.

CV Publications Tools Media

Additional Roles

Accredited Actuary

As an actuary accredited by the Algerian Union of Insurance and Reinsurance Companies (UAR), I advise life insurance companies on pricing and reserving, applying actuarial methods to ensure financial soundness and regulatory compliance.

Policy Advisor

I collaborate with key governmental institutions in Algeria, contributing to population policy (National Committee for Population), social security (Ministry of Labor), and social statistics (National Council of Statistics).

Consultant

I serve as a consultant for several UN agencies (UNESCWA, UNFPA, UNDP), working on population health, ageing, and social protection. My contributions focus on generating evidence through statistical analysis and demographic modelling.

Public Engagement

I play an active role in promoting actuarial science globally as a mentor in UNDP’s actuarial programmes (AFDP, GAIN), and in Algeria as Vice President of the Algerian Association of Actuaries (ALGAA) and advisor to the Algerian Association of Social Security.

Research

I study demographic dynamics—mortality, morbidity, and ageing—and their impact on the sustainability of social security systems in Algeria. My work also examines mortality and health inequalities between migrants and natives in high-income countries.

Publications Conferences Tools Media

Migrant Mortality & Health

My recent research examines mortality and health inequalities between migrants and native populations in high-income countries. I analyse how country of origin shapes mortality advantages and how these patterns evolve over time.

This work relies on large-scale administrative data (registered deaths and population censuses) and contributes to ongoing debates on migrant health and demographic change in Europe and the UK.

Our analysis of Spain shows that migrants from low- and middle-income countries tend to have a mortality advantage over native populations, whereas those from countries with comparable income levels often display a no-advantage or even a disadvantage. See the full paper for a detailed discussion of the migrant mortality paradox.

Read the Paper

Population Ageing & Pension Sustainability

Our research shows that ongoing population ageing in Algeria will further widen the deficit of the retirement system in the coming decades. The ratio of working-age to retirement-age individuals fell below 6 in 2022 for the first time in Algeria’s history and is projected to reach 2.7 by 2047 [read more...].

This demographic shift limits the effectiveness of parametric reforms, which alone are unlikely to restore financial balance [read more ...].

Alternative reform options have been proposed to maintain the deficit at manageable levels, including leveraging the system’s profitability [read more...] and introducing a contribution cap to better target public subsidies toward lower-income groups [read more...].

To support policy analysis, we developed web applications: the Retirement Sustainability Simulator, allowing users to assess the impact of different reform scenarios on the system’s long-term sustainability, and the Population Projection Simulator, allowing to visualise poulation change using customised scenarios of mortality and fertility

We produced R tutorials that can be used by students, researchers, and policymakers to produce poulation projections [Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2] and designed a web application to collect expert opinions and produce expert-based population rojections [ Expert Survey Tool].

Health Expectancy

Overall, your findings highlight that people are living longer but spending more years in poor health, with important implications for healthcare demand, labour force participation, and the sustainability of social protection systems [read more...].

Your research shows that gains in life expectancy in Algeria have not been matched by improvements in healthy life expectancy. Between 2006 and 2019, older adults experienced increases in total life expectancy, but a decline in years lived free of chronic disease, indicating an expansion of morbidity [read more...].

Chronic conditions—particularly hypertension and diabetes—account for a large share of healthy life years lost, with growing contributions over time . These patterns are consistent with broader trends observed in the MENA region, where improvements in longevity are accompanied by persistent or widening gaps in health status. [read more...]

Mortality Evolution in Algeria

My research provides a comprehensive analysis of mortality trends in Algeria, combining historical reconstruction, data quality assessment, inequality analysis, methodological advances, and forecasting.

From a historical perspective, I show that mortality has improved substantially since independence, but with significant disruptions. In particular, the violence of the 1990s resulted in a loss of nearly two years of life expectancy. I also demonstrate that part of the observed fluctuations in mortality trends is driven by methodological changes and improvements in data collection [read the paper].

A key component of my work focuses on assessing and improving the quality of mortality data. Using mortality surfaces, I identify inconsistencies and structural breaks in the data—especially during the late 1970s and early 1980s—and document substantial improvements following the 1983 period and the 1998 census [read the paper].

Methodologically, I contribute to the estimation of old-age mortality [read more ...] and the reconstruction of missing data in the historical surface of age-specific mortality rates [read more ...] . I also develop coherent mortality forecasting models to project future mortality trends and support population projections and actuarial applications [read more ...].

My works involve also analysing retirees mortality and designing forecasting models to expect future evolution in limited data contexts [read more ...].

In addition, I contribute to the production and validation of mortality indicators using alternative data sources, such as survey data, to assess consistency with official statistics (download report).

I also contributed with an R package allowing for interpolating age-specific mortality rates accross all ages from an abridged life table. The package Q2q is available on CRAN (the official R repository), and a paper presenting the package, its features, and practical cases using data from Algeria and Japan, was published in the Journal of Open Research Software

Overall, this work provides a consistent and data-driven understanding of mortality dynamics in Algeria, while offering improved datasets and tools for researchers and policymakers.

Datasets