The insurance industry is relatively well developed. It makes extensive use of reinsurance facilities and is free from the pervasive premium, product, investment, and reinsurance controls that have bedeviled the insurance markets of so many developing countries around the world. Total premiums...

Despite the limited scope resulting from the high payroll taxes for the compulsory, unfunded public pillar in Hungary's pensions system, the early voluntary private pensions fund performance has been encouraging. Investment returns have been well above the inflation rate and participation has...

Like other financial institutions, private pension funds require a panoply of prudential and protective regulations to ensure their soundness and safeguard the interests of affiliated workers. These regulations include authorization criteria (such as as minimum capital,"fit and proper,"and...

For both economic and regulatory reasons, most developing countries have underdeveloped pension funds and insurance sectors, and their social security systems face many financial and organizational problems. Wide-ranging reform would produce considerable economic and social benefits. A...

Leading financial economists have proposed the use of international asset swaps (Merton 1990, Bodie and Merton 2002) as a way of efficiently achieving international diversification without eroding the level of foreign exchange reserves and weakening local market development. International asset...

The main economic functions of the insurance sector are to cover financial risk and to mobilize long-term savings. The sector can also play an important role in developing the private sector and modernizing the securities market. But to play its economic and financial roles, the insurance sector...

Countries with small financial systems are generally small economies with a reduced dimension of institutional relationships, a greater concentration of wealth, and a relatively less independent civil service. These characteristics facilitate concentration of functions and, more generally, weak...

Mauritius belongs to a select group of developing countries where contractual savings-savings with insurance companies and pension funds-exceed 40 percent of GDP and represent a major potential force in the local financial system. Pension funds account for 75 percent of contractual savings....

Contractual savings institutions - pension funds and life insurance companies - have long been important institutions in several developing countries. But, with notable exceptions, they have been weak and underdeveloped. Some of this is attributable to low levels of income in developing...

This paper classifies financial regulations by their primary objective into six types: macroeconomic, allocative, structural, prudential, organizational, and protective. The author notes that the most regulations have effects that cut across different objectives and that structural controls are...