The Study On The Differential Development Of China’s Regional Life Insurance

China’s life insurance industry after more than thirty years of development, has quickly grown into the world’s most promising emerging life insurance market, and the total size of life insurance has maintained rapid growth. However, we must recognize that compared with developed countries, our life insurance industry still in its infancy, there are many problems to be solved, such as the low level of social-acceptance, the low degree of market, the single homogeneous product and the great differences in development between regions and so on. Particularly, the uneven development of regional life insurance is an important manifestation of the current structural contradictions in China’s life insurance. The regional development of China’s insurance industry have significant differences, and this has been a consensus among industry, academia and the regulatory authorities. At the same time, the government has gradually introduced a series of policy, which will guide our insurance industry to develop coordinately and sustainably. For instance,"A number of opinions of State Council on the reform and development of the insurance industry (2006)" made it clear that we must to "coordinate the regional development of the insurance industry", and "the Twelfth Five-Year plan" about the insurance industry’s development also made this point clearly. Insurance has the function of social management, financing and economic compensation, it plays an important role in a national economy, a social security system and a financial system. While the life insurance industry plays a crucial role in the insurance industry, it is able to protect people’s need to survive and improve the quality of people’s life, and then in addition to enrich people’s lives, life insurance also can create conditions to promote the comprehensive development of the whole society ultimately.In this article, China’s life insurance areas will be divided into four regions as eastern, central, western and northeastern. After using the traditional indicators of China’s life insurance industry as premium income, insurance density and insurance penetration to observe the regional life insurance development, we attempt to use the "Benchmark Ratio of Insurance Density", which is a dimensionless relative index, to re-examine the development of our country’s regional life insurance industry. And we come to a conclusion which is inconsistent with the one under the traditional approach:After a stage of rapid development, the development of eastern life insurance in the sense of per-capita disposable income is at a backward level between regions. However, generally speaking, each regional life insurance’s development is fairly balanced. After using qualitative analysis for some factors which may influence China’s life insurance, this article chooses life insurance density as the index measured the development of regional life insurance industry, per-capita disposable income, per-capita savings deposit balance, the level of education, the level of urbanization, the total dependency ratio and the degree of social security as the key influencing factors for China’s life insurance, and then establish a panel-data regression model. The results of the national life insurance industry regression model suggest that per-capita disposable income can impact the development of life insurance to a large extent, and the income elasticity of life insurance demand is greater than1, indicating that life insurance products is still a luxury for our country’s residents, meanwhile, the influence of other factors for the life insurance is consistent with theoretical analysis. Regional life insurance industry regression model shows that the per-capita disposable income and the total dependency ratio have positive correlation with the life insurance density, the relationship between the remaining explanatory variables and the life insurance density are different among regions. Finally, combining the results of qualitative analysis and empirical analysis, and according to the practical problems occurred in the development process of China’s life insurance industry, this paper tries to put forward some proposals as the following ways:the relationship between life insurance and economic development, the life insurance industry itself and the profession supervision and management, which may be benefit for our country life insurance industry to achieve balanced regional development.