Book Description
The thesis has examined the role of selected socioeconomic factors (including income) as well as product market factors on the demand for life insurance. Applying the empirical approach of Li et al. (2007) with some minor model adjustments it could be shown that income (measured as GDP per capita) as well as the dependency ratio and the social security expenses can be regarded as a powerful predictor of life insurance demand. The model was applied on an annual dataset from 2000 to 2017 for the countries of Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and the emerging countries of Brazil and China. Due to data availability issues for Brazil and China, these countries needed to be excluded from the calculation. The study has also shed some doubt on the role of factors like life expectancy, education, financial development, foreign market share and inflation as to their ability to predict life insurance demand. As the study is restricted to the selected group of advanced economies, further work in emerging economies is propagated. However, for such work to perform empirically, data availability and data construction issues have to be solved by the providers of such data.
