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...

The regulation and supervision of pension funds is a critical part of building public confidence in a funded-pension system. This report argues that confidence is best bolstered by an independent, autonomous, and transparent supervision agency, particularly when previous systems have failed. The...

This report summarizes key aspects of unemployment benefit schemes across the world and presents information on their characteristics in a cross-country comparative context. Unemployment benefit schemes can be of insurance type (paid from employer/worker contributions to provide insurance...

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...

Contractual savings institutions include national provident funds, life insurance companies, private pension funds, and funded social pension insurance systems. They have long-term liabilities and stable cash flows and are therefore ideal providers of term finance, not only to government and...

This report reviews defined contribution pension return guarantees typically made by governments in connection with pension privatizations. Finance theory related to the pricing of options provides a unifying framework for evaluating the cost of these guarantees. The report considers two types...

The authors assess empirically the impact of contractual savings institutions portfolios (pension funds and life insurance companies) on securities markets, for example, depth and liquidity in the domestic stock market, and depth in the domestic bond market. They discuss how the...

This paper draws lessons from the advantages and disadvantages of the heterodox stabilization approach in chronic high inflation countries. Heterodox stabilization programs make temporary use of some income policies - price and wage controls - to support orthodox policies. Heterodox programs...

The author examines public economics rationales for public intervention in health insurance markets, draws on the literature of organizational design to examine alternative intervention strategies, and considers health insurance reforms in four Latin American countries -- Argentina, Brazil,...

The objective of this paper is to gain new insights about the strengths and weaknesses of the heterodox approach for stopping inflation based on the experience of programs implemented in some Latin American countries and Israel in the sixties and eighties. The most important income policies...