National culture, public health spending and life insurance consumption: an international comparison

Abstract

Abstract This study aims to offer insight on the national cultural differences, public health expenditures, and economic freedom that persisted in life insurance expenditure across 28 advanced economies and 21 emerging and developing economies from 2002 to 2017. Our system GMM estimator’s analysis reveals that cultural factors, public health spending, economic freedom, financial development, human development, life expectancy, dependency ratio, and the Muslim religion are the major determinants of life insurance consumption at the aggregate level (i.e., for all sample economies). Between the group of advanced economies and the group of emerging and developing economies, these results, however, differ dramatically. It is noteworthy that cultural factors, such as masculinity and uncertainty avoidance, do not account for life insurance spending in advanced economies but have a statistically significant impact on life insurance consumption in emerging and developing economies. One point of interest is that our findings demonstrate that consumers in advanced nations as well as emerging and developing economies with a higher degree of public health spending and economic freedom tend to spend more on life insurance products. Both international life insurance businesses and governments from all around the world can benefit from the findings.