Research On The Recognition And Measurement Of New Life Insurance Contracts

The new life insurance contracts originated in European and American areas in the1960s, which refers to the insurance contracts with additional financing and investment functions, including participating insurance, investment-linked insurance and universal life insurance. In our country new life insurance contracts arouse late, however, with the exacerbation of the competition in financial industry and the enhancement of our residents’awareness of financing and investment, the new life insurances which can provide both protection and investment functions develop at very fast speed, according to industry data, now the premium income generated from new life insurance contracts has accounted for more than80%of the overall premium income of life insurance products, so the quality of the accounting of new life insurance contracts has a direct impact on the authenticity and reliability of the financial information provided by the insurance companies. Due to the particularity of the business model of insurance companies, accounting for insurance contracts has always been a focus in current financial accounting areas. In recent years, both IASB and our country has done a lot in the study of insurance accounting and already made some significant progress, however, the characteristics like investment function, flexibility, transparency in new life insurance contract increase the difficulty of its accounting and also put forward some new requests to the insurance accounting system. Therefore, we focus on the recognition and measurement of new life insurance contracts as our study and hope to make a little contribution to the development of the insurance accounting standards in our country.This article uses the method of standard research, and its main content is divided into five parts:Part I Introduction. Briefly described the background and significance of the study, gave a literature review of IASB and our country’s study on insurance contract, and also introduced the content and method of the study.Part Ⅱ A General Outline of the Accounting Problems of New Life Insurance Contracts. Based on industry data analyzed the development situation and prospects of new life insurance contracts in our country, briefly introduced the characteristics of the three kinds of new life insurance contracts and their requests on accounting, at last proposed the problems should be deeply studied in the recognition and measurement of new life insurance contracts respectively and also the special problems aroused out of the differences in the design of the three kinds of new life insurance contracts.Part Ⅲ The Study on the Significant Problems of the Recognition of New Life Insurance Contracts. Gave a research on the related standards of IASB and our country, analyzed the performance and relevant influence of our country’s current standards with the financial information of China Ping’an, at last proposed the existing problems and gave the corresponding suggestions.Part Ⅳ The Study on the Measurement Problems of the Measurement of New Life Insurance Contracts. Gave a research on the development of the measurement model of insurance liabilities and the current standards, analyzed the special problems of the measurement of the liabilities of new life insurance contracts and the relevant influence of our current standards, at last proposed the existing problems and gave the corresponding suggestions.Part Ⅴ The Study on the Special Accounting Problems of the Three Kinds of New Life Insurance Contracts. Analyzed the special problems on the recognition and measurement of the three kinds of new life insurance contracts due to their differences in design respectively, proposed the opinion of this article and also some suggestions.Part Ⅵ Conclusions.According to the above research, I think that with the improvement of our insurance accounting standards in recent years, our insurance rules has basically achieved the convergence with IASB, which improved the quality of the financial information of insurance industry, however, the rules on the problems of the recognition and measurement of new life insurance contracts, which accounts for a important position in life insurance industry, are still not enough and also exists some limitations, for example, there is still no detailed guidelines for the partition of the mixed insurance contract and the significant insurance risk test; The special problems in the measurement of liabilities of new life insurance contracts have not been stipulated; Problems aroused out of the differences in design has not been mentioned in our standards. For the above problems, I would try to find the solutions.