| China’s insurance industry experienced 20 years’closure and recovered in 1982. During 30 years’ups and downs, China’s life insurance market has got a tremendous development. With the lasting growth of global economy, insurance industry has played an increasingly important role in people’s economic life, and life insurance demand keeps increasing. It is of great practical significance to study the life insurance market.Since 2003, China’s economic growth rate has taken the first place in the world, however, life insurance has not constantly shown a positive correlation with it. As is known to all, insurance has financial compensation as the basic function and financing as the derived function. Apparently, insurance has a close relationship with the stability of a country’s or region’s economy and with people’s life. Nowadays, with the rapid growth of China’s economy, people’s income has been increasingly larger, along with our national savings ranking NO.1 in the world. As a result, there should be a lot of life insurance demand. In addition, our people have been facing the relative poor social security system, lack of both coverage and amount, and life insurance could effectively avoid some of the risks, thus the potential demand should be great. But the lack of effective demand is apparent not only in the whole country but also in local places. It also partly reflects that the development of China’s life insurance industry has some problems.This study, taking Sichuan as the object, conducts an analysis of the influence factors of its life insurance demand. According to a paper which studied the life insurance market of China’s provinces, in 2010, Sichuan’s life insurance premium ranked 7th, its life insurance density ranked 16th, and its life insurance depth ranked 3rd. Among these rankings, it is obvious that the life insurance density does not perform so well. Our province’s life insurance market still has a great potential in development. Thus, it is of great significance to study the influence factors of life insurance in Sichuan.This paper employs the normative analysis and empirical analysis methods, along with the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis methods. Based on the summary of the previous literature at home and abroad and guided by the early thoughts of life insurance, Maslow’s "hierarchy of needs" theory and the modem theories of life insurance, it first describes the current situation of the life insurance industry in Sichuan, and sums up the influence factors on the life insurance demand, including economic, social and policy factors. Then it adopts Panel Data Model to study how these factors influence the demand in most cities of Sichuan, and finally sums up the important influence factors and puts forward some suggestions to the government departments, insurance companies and insurance regulators.The main content of the paper is divided into the following four parts:Part I is Introduction and Chapter I, which mainly introduces previous research and theories related to life insurance demand. It first introduces the research background and significance of the study, and reviews the previous literature at home and abroad. Then it describes the train of thought and methods of this study and also the innovation and inadequacy. Chapter I first introduces the concept, basic contents, classification and feature of life insurance, then it describes its functions (including general functions and special utilities), and finally introduces the definition as well as the thoughts and theories of life insurance demand.Part II is Chapter II, which is an analysis about the situation of life insurance market in Sichuan Province. It analyzes the overall conditions, the market structure and the product structure of life insurance market in Sichuan.Part III is Chapter III and Chapter IV, which analyzes the influence factors of life insurance demand in Sichuan Province. Chapter III analyzes three categories of influence factors of the life insurance demand in Sichuan, including:economic, social and policy factors. Among them, economic factors include income, price of life insurance, interest rates, (expected) inflation, savings and financial development factors. Social factors include family size, urbanization, mortality, dependency ratio, education and conditions of insurance supply market. Policy factors include insurance industry and regulatory policies, the level of social security system, tax policy and institution switch. Chapter IV establishes a measurement model (Panel Data Model) to analyze how these factors in the previous chapter influence life insurance demand in our province. It selects nine important factors in the three categories mentioned in Chapter IV as variables in the model, and chooses Entity Random Effects Regression Model as a final model. As a result, four of variables are significant including income (GDP per capita and per capita disposable income), level of social security system and level of financial development factors.Part IV is Chapter V, which is the conclusions and suggestions of the full paper. It first gives the conclusions of the full paper and then puts forward suggestions to the government, insurance companies and insurance regulators about how to improve life insurance demand of our province.The main innovation of this paper is:Firstly, compiling a lot of historical data in Sichuan Province, employing normative and empirical analysis as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis, this paper studies the life insurance demand in Sichuan Province, and analyzes the influence of economic, social and policy factors on it.Secondly, by studying the data of the life insurance market in Sichuan Province, this paper establishes Panel Data Model of years from 2002 to 2009 and places among 18 prefecture-level cities in our province.Thirdly, by factor analysis and empirical analysis, it obtains the important influence factors of life insurance demand in Sichuan Province, and puts forward some suggestions of practical significance to the development of life insurance demand in our province. The analysis methods of the full paper have some reference value in general. |
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