Humanities and Social Sciences (Mar 2018)
ANALYSIS OF INSURANCE DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
Abstract
The article analyses the state of development and growth dynamics of insurance markets in selected European countries through applying four statistical indicators: share of insurance premium in the global insurance market premium, share of insurance premium per capita, share of insurance premium in GDP and share of life insurance premium in the entire insurance premium amount.A strategic developmental objective of the European financial services market is to guarantee a high degree of integration of insurance markets of particular countries within the European financial community and to adapt those insurance markets to the requirements of the Solvency II Directive.The applied analysis of insurance market concentrations in European countries helped divide them into three clusters that differ from one another. The first cluster includes countries with a large share of insurance premiums in the global market and a large share of insurance premiums in GDP. The second cluster groups together countries with a high level of insurance premiums per capita and a high share of life insurance premiums in the total amount of insurance premiums. The third one encompasses countries with the lowest values of analysed indicators, i.e. those that exhibit a low development level of insurance market, where property insurance prevails.The years 2011–2016 basically saw no changes in the structure of those clusters, although it was observed that even small fluctuations of indicator values may lead to a change in a certain insurance market position in a given cluster.The calculated average indicators of insurance market development dynamics have revealed a high degree of heterogeneity of analysed countries as regards the level of development of their insurance markets and their structure. The Polish insurance market has qualified to the third cluster and, as such, approximates average cluster values in terms of its development, while its development dynamics is decreasing.
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