Study On Formation, Operation, And Protection Mechanism Of Fishery Mutual-Cooperative Insurance

Fishery is an important component of agriculture in China, output value of fishery counts for more than 10% of total output value of agriculture, export value of aquatic products has been at the front ranks of bulk agricultural commodities. Fishery is also recognized world-wide as a high-risk industry. Sustainable development of fishery economics and social stability of fishery areas have been affected seriously as a result of prominent contradictions in fishery high input, high risk and low security. Fishery insurance plays an important role in dispersing fishery risk, compensating fishermen’s loss and assuring fishery production safety, however, which pattern of fishery insurance should be adopted is a vexed issue. In Chinese fishery insurance practices, commercial insurance companies had chose to give up because of operating losses led by high loss ratio of fishery insurance. In sharp contrast to this, mutual-cooperative fishery insurance is in continuous operation and shows the strong vitality, provides the necessary risk protection services for fishermen’s production and living. However, studies on theory of fishery risk and fishery insurance are relatively lagging, and specialized researches to fishery cooperative insurance are very scarce. Due to lack of analysis of theoretical basis for fishery mutual-cooperative insurance, a number of issues which exist in practice and need theory guide can’t be explained reasonably, the future development of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance is not clear. Therefore systematic analysis of fishery risk and fishery mutual-cooperative insurance mechanism has a strong practical significance.Adopting methods combining theoretical analysis with empirical analysis, this dissertation gives a penetrating analysis on formation, operation and protection mechanisms of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance. The main contents are as follows: Part 1 reviews related literatures of fishery cooperative insurance and puts forward research ideas and methods. To provide a theoretical basis for follow-up studies, part 2 distinguishes and defines some concepts related to fishery risk, fishery insurance, analyzes operating basis and basic forms of mutual-cooperative insurance. Part 3 introduces the mutual-cooperative fishery insurance history in developed countries (regions), and aims to provide experience and reference for Chinese fishery mutual-cooperative insurance research. Part 4 analyses background and history of Chinese fishery mutual-cooperative insurance, explains the motivation of its formation with the use of supply and demand theory, transaction cost theory, and performs a field survey to the actual market. Part 5 evaluates performance of China Fishery Mutual Insurance Association from economic and social effects, points out the lack of financial support and imperfect internal governance mechanisms are the biggest obstacles during the development of China Fishery Mutual Insurance Association. For the problem revealed by the fifth part, Part 6 analyzes deeply positive and negative effects of government intervention in the development of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance, and tests it through empirical analysis; On this basis, to provide guidance of design and policy recommendations of protection mechanism of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance, it probes the reasonable boundaries of government intervention. Part 7 designs protection mechanism of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance from three aspects of organization governance, financial support and external regulation, calculates premium subsidy scale combined with situation and development of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance to provide reference to subsidy policy. Based on the preceding analysis, part 8 puts forward policy recommendations to improve and perfect formation, operation and protection mechanism of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance.The main conclusions of this dissertation as follows: (1) High risk of fishery production is the basic premise of demand for fishery insurance. Because the source of income for fishermen is single and the methods of dealing with the risk are lack, they tend to choose insurance as a means of risk transfer. Fishery mutual-cooperative insurance organizations have much more advantages than insurance companies in reducing transaction costs caused by adverse selection and moral hazard. Commercial insurance is not available for fishermen, so mutual-cooperative insurance is an inevitable choice to against risk, thus motivation of cooperative insurance was formed. (2) China Fishery Mutual Insurance Association as a typical representative of the mutual-cooperative insurance organizations has played a very important role for fishermen to spread risk and provide risk protection, to some extent makes up for missing supply of commercial fishery insurance market. (3) China Fishery Mutual Insurance Association is not a real fishermen“mutual assistance”organization, it runs with a government-run color because of excessive administrative intervention, its operation lacks autonomy and independence, the interests of fishermen are ignored. (4) China fishery mutual-cooperative insurance can not develop without government intervention, there are positive and negative effects of government intervention. Government intervention should have a reasonable boundary. On the one hand, in the development of fishery mutual-cooperative insurance, government should reduce intervention to internal operation of mutual insurance association so as to make it estimate relatively sound internal governance mechanisms. On the other hand, to improve enthusiasm of fishermen to insurance, government should support mutual insurance association from laws and policies and give the insured fishermen premium subsidies. For those reasons, appropriate governance, financial support and external regulatory mechanisms should be established to achieve sustainable development of fisheries.