ABSTRACT
Among measures tackling the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the selling of private insurance policies covering individual infection is overlooked by the ethics literature. To record the "COVID Claimania" in Taiwan and to assess its ethical implications, we collected 38 policies from 10 insurers sold between January 2020 and May 2022 and found that their risk calculation of the COVID-19 prevalence ranged from 0.5% to 11.08%. In reality, the prevalence by the end of 2022 was 37% in Taiwan. Selling private insurance policies is ethically problematic in three ways. First, it represents the insurance industry's irresponsible risk-taking profit-seeking behaviors. Second, it would jeopardize the effectiveness of the disease-prevention measures by inducing uncontrollable moral hazards. Third, it would expose the insurance companies to unbearable financial risks and cause substantial negative external impacts. The government should intervene in the private insurance market in preparation for future public health emergencies.
ABSTRACT
China's modern insurance market is the largest in the world in terms of several key indicators: both the number of contracts concluded and the volume of premiums collected. At the same time, insurance products related to property insurance are the second most popular among the population. However, the development curve of the insurance market in China is significantly different from the trajectories of changes in the insurance markets in Europe or the United States. This article is a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of insurance relations in the Chinese market under the influence of various factors, such as changes in the macroeconomic environment, the introduction of innovative technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic. During the transition from a planned economic system to a market one, as well as after China's joining the WTO, external economic factors changed the development trends of China's insurance industry. Based on the data of the National Bureau of Statistics of China for 2007–2020 and the Wind database, the authors built an econometric model that allowed analyzing the impact of various factors on the growth of property insurance in China. Special attention is paid to the impact of modern trends associated with the active introduction of digital technologies and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on the development of the property insurance segment. The ongoing optimization of the system of insurance protection of the property of the population is primarily due to its risk management function. China's experience in the development of insurance relations in the national market may be in demand in Russia, which belongs to countries with a developing insurance market. © 2022 Educational Autonomous Non-Profit Organization Nephrology. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
As in many parts of the world, the Covid-19 sanitary pandemic has hit very hard the economies hard in the of the countries of the Western Balkans. The economy faced a "shock” both on the supply and on the demand. Most economic sectors were paralyzed. One of these sectors is the insurance market, which represents a relatively important weight for the economic and financial sector. The purpose of this article is to show the impact of Covid-19 on the insurance market in the three countries of the Western Balkans: Albania, Serbia and Northern Macedonia. Based on the specifics of this crisis and particularly that of the insurance sector, the purpose of this article is to verify the impact of Covid-19 on the insurance market and specifically, on the volumes of gross annual premiums. To verify it, we have analyzed the annual data of this sector, before the pandemic and throughout the pandemic. The results show that the Covid-19 pandemic for Albania and Macedonia has had a negative impact on the market of this sector, while for Serbia we have an increase in the annual data.
ABSTRACT
The development of life insurance sector in the Baltic States is influenced by various opportunities and threats from the macroeconomic environment. In this context, the aim of this paper is to identify some macroeconomic factors that influence various indicators describing the life insurance market in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in the period 1993-2020 (direct premiums written, life insurance density, and life insurance penetration). The panel data approach suggests that economic growth, expenditure on tertiary education and income supports the development of the life insurance sector in these countries, while higher unemployment negatively affects the insurance market. These results have implications for the life insurance market forecasting in the new international context dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic. © 2022, University of National and World Economy. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
We provide a novel approach for analysing the financial resilience of the insurance sector during coronavirus pandemic. To this end, we build temporal directed and weighted networks where the weights on the arcs take into account the tail dependence between couple of firms. To assess the resilience of the network, we provide a new global indicator, aimed at capturing the impact on the clustering coefficient of a shock affecting in turn each firm and diffusing in the network via shortest paths. A local measure of resilience is also provided by quantifying the contribution of each firm to the global indicator. In this way, we are able to detect most critical firms in the system. A numerical application has been developed in order to test the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed resilience measure appears able to detect main periods of financial crises. The first wave of COVID-19 pandemic results as a extreme phenomenon in the market and the lowest resilience is associated to the period in which COVID-19 has been declared pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The subject of the research is the segments of the financial system of the Russian Federation: the budget system, the banking sector, the stock and insurance markets, and the currency policy of the state. The purpose of the study is to determine the trends and factors in the development of the main elements of the financial system at the present stage. The relevance of scientific research is due to the fact that the financial system is a key element of the strategy of socio-economic development of any state, providing economic processes with financial resources and capital. The author uses the following methods: analysis, synthesis, generalization, and the logical method. The study highlights promising directions, ways and mechanisms for the development of the Russian financial system that are relevant in the 2020s. The key factors influencing their trends and threats that create barriers are analyzed. The main directions, ways and mechanisms for stimulating the further development of the elements of the financial system are described. The author concludes that due to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and economic sanctions imposed on Russia, the stability of the Russian financial system has been violated, which requires the adoption of state regulation mechanisms to improve the activities of financial institutions. The prospect of further research on this topic may be related to the development of areas for improving individual elements of the Russian financial system. © Ismoilov g.N., 2022.
ABSTRACT
The need for security and protection of human life and health is the very cornerstone behind life insurance demand which has become larger with the current COVID-19 atmosphere. Life insurance penetration is significantly lower in Bulgaria compared to the EU average, while studies on the subject of how this development came about are almost absent. In that regard, this article is focused on the influence of major macroeconomic, demographic and competitive factors over life insurance penetration in Bulgaria. When it comes to the methodological aspect, the study is based on the theory of demand and industrial organisation by applying the descriptive and correlation analysis methods. The results underline that despite the positive trends in life gross premiums, written for the period of 2009-2020, Bulgarians prefer to allocate their excess funds towards alternative investment opportunities. To a large extent, this is attributed to the low amount of income and the low productivity of the economy as well as because of the lack of effective competition between the small number of insurance companies. From the customers’ point of view, this leads to a lack of awareness of the benefits of insurance, distrust and the absence of insurance interest, all of which are intensified during COVID-19. Responding to the market in relation to new business, supplying flexible, personalised and hybrid varieties of products, omni-channelling and development of positive attitudes among the population are all regarded as basic guidelines, used to improve insurance penetration. This article, therefore, serves as a foundation for a more in-depth study of the Bulgarian life insurance market, a stimulus for increasing the financial literacy of the Bulgarian populace and a subject of interest for insurance companies themselves in their fight to promote activity and to unleash market potential. © 2022, Bulgarska Akademiya na Naukite. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is an analysis of the presence of self-selection mechanisms on the market that could bring the market closer to the separating equilibrium state, in line with the Rothschild–Stiglitz equilibrium model and its subsequent modifications. An example is the Polish market of compulsory third-party liability insurance of vehicle owners. This paper describes this market in terms of both its structure and its financial results. The main focus is on describing the assumptions of the Rothschild–Stiglitz model for markets operating under the conditions of information asymmetry and based on the self-selection mechanism, allowing for an unequivocal determination of the insured’s profile without the need to actually observe the insured’s behaviour. Finally, we show that thanks to the self-selection induced by the possibility of driving behaviour monitoring, the industry can minimise the negative effect information asymmetry has on the motor insurance market. This can be achieved, for example, by observing the choices made by the insured after being offered a new voluntary contract with a premium based on telematics data. Our analysis was carried out with the use of three selected characteristics that can determine the insured’s risk profile, i.e., distance covered, self-assessment, and insurance premium paid;the significance of the latter—although it may be intuitive—is questionable at commonly accepted significance levels. Therefore, the main result is that although there is some evidence on the disputed matter, there can be no definitive conclusion—especially in terms of risk as measured by insurance premium.