Influence Factors on European Life Insurance Market during Crises

The economic crisis affects all financial system components, economic literature three types of financial crises: currency crises, banking crises and debt crises. The term insurance crisis is, in our opinion, different in its effects from economic crises in insurance industry. Economic crisis affects the insurance industry because of the insurance integration in financial system components and their interrelations. There are delimitations between insurance, banking and financial markets, but we see nowadays, in the context of globalization, a major interaction between these fields. Actual paper wants to emphasize the evolution of the Romanian and European countries' life insurance market during the recent financial crises. In this approach, we consider that the situation that characterizes the entire economy being also useable for insurance market and insurance system. Our research goal refers, in the first part of the paper, to some comparisons with the evolution of the life European insurance system and market and Romania focusing the analyse on some important indicators: Insurance Density, Insurance Penetration Rate, total Growth Premium, Gross Written Premium. The second part of the paper focus on influence factors such as Life Insurance Gross direct premiums written (dependent variable), and Total Employment (National Concept at 1000 persons), GDP per capita (in euro), Households with Internet access (Percentage of households), Life Insurance Number of enterprises, Life Insurance Number of persons employed, Life Insurance Personnel costs, as independent variables, and time as dummy variables are analysed through panel data robust statistical regression. The data is based on Eurostat database. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.