Research On Unbalance Of Regional Life Insurance In China

Chinese insurance industry has experienced a rapid development since it’s recovery, and the premium of life insurance has developed into a large scale. But the existed problems, such as the unbalanced development of life insurance among various regions, cannot be ignored. In this paper, we do empirical research on the regional unbalance of life insurance in China, using the panel data of Chinese mainland’s31provinces from2005to2012,248samples altogether.The comparative and cluster analysis method are used to prove that the imbalances exist among different regions. Then considering the economic, social, demographic, insurance awareness and supply-side factors, we analyze the expected impacts between life insurance density and related indicators. We select GDP Per Capita, level of education, degree of urbanization, elderly dependency ratio, consumer price index, disposable income of urban residents, number of insurance companies providing life insurance products and life insurance industry concentration as independent variables, and choose life insurance density as dependent variable for empirical analysis. Panel data model has been used to investigate factors that influencing the development of life insurance in China. It is found that each independent variable has a significant impact on the development of life insurance by using univariate regression, but some indicators don’t fit very well. Multiple regression results show that GDP Per Capita has an important impact on the development of life insurance, but it is not significant. Degree of urbanization and number of insurance companies have significant positive correlation with life insurance density, while elderly dependency ratio and industry concentration have significant negative correlation with life insurance density.Combining with the three economic zones, all provinces are divided into three big regions:eastern region, western region and central region. After comparing the differences of indicators among the three big regions, we analyze reasons for the unbalanced development of life insurance among various regions. At last, we make suggestions for promoting balanced development of life insurance in China.