Influencing Factors And Optimization Study Of China’s Life Insurance Product Structure

The China’s insurance industry has been developing rapidly since China resumed its commercial insurance business in1979, and now it becomes one of the pillars of China’s financial industry. As a significant part of insurance business, life insurance has been growing fast for the past decades. In2013, the annual premium of life insurance in China has reached1,722.224billion RMB, ranking the fourth in the world. However, there’re dangers hidden behind this glamorous achievement. The life insurance business in China has been growing spontaneously in a rough way since it was resumed in1982. In order to occupy the advanced position in the industry, many insurances companies regard the expanding of the premium income as their main business objective. As a result, the market is flooded with various kinds of participating and investment-linked insurance products, which are supposed to cater to the short-term investment needs of the applicants. Therefore, the life insurance industry is facing a serious problem that the proportion of the new type products in the its overall premium is too high, which tends to be the obstacles that hinder the sustainable and stable development of China’s life insurance industry in the long run.This paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. This part mainly introduces the purposes, significance, methodologies, contributions and limits of the paper.The second chapter is about the life insurance industry, products and its portfolio changes. This part gives a detailed description of the life insurance industry, products and the history of changes in its structure.The third chapter is the analysis of the factors that affect the structure of life insurance products. Primarily, this chapter introduces the major theories related to the life insurance products and its structure. Subsequently, it analyzes the influence factors that influence the structure of life insurance products in theory. Lastly, it makes the empirical analysis of these affecting factors. The fourth chapter explores the reasons that cause the imbalance in the structure of life insurance products. Based on the above theoretical analysis, this part suggests that four main points lead to the problems:the existence of cyclical fluctuations in economic environment, the weak competences among life insurance products, the lag in the restructure of products and the imperfectness in measurement.The fifth chapter sets the optimal targets for the structure of China’s life insurance products and provides relative advices for improvement at the aspect of supply and demand.The innovations of the thesis are as follows.(1)The past researches mainly analyzed the problems at a single aspect of either demand or supply, while this paper explores the contributing factors that affect the structure of life insurance products from the aspects of both supply and demand, and then finds the underlying reasons for these factors.(2)In order to determine the main influencing factors, the paper conducts the panel analysis of the structure of life insurance products after financial crisis by adopting the data of32life insurance companies from2008to2012...