"Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book’s chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural...

This paper focuses on asset allocation decisions of life insurance companies in emerging markets. Mature market insurers allocate only a small fraction of their assets to emerging markets because of regulatory constraints, rating pressures, and currency risk. However, global insurers invest...

Insurance enterprises provide services, called insurance services, to policyholders. The values of such services are seldom, if ever, directly apparent; rather these values are implicitly entwined within the payment of premiums. This paper discusses the treatment of insurance services, and...

The staff report highlights that the insurance sector in Sweden is well developed and mature. The captive insurance segment is mainly driven by tax advantages. This assessment provides an update on the significant regulatory and supervisory developments in the insurance sector of Sweden since...

This paper focuses on risk transfer and discusses the insurance sector, particularly life insurers. It expands on issues raised in previous Global Financial Stability Reports by asking whether financial stability has benefited or could benefit from insurers’ broader participation in credit...

Intraregional financial activity in Central America has grown substantially in the past decade, contributing to efficiency and economic development. At the same time, the expansion of activities by regional conglomerates has increased the challenges to supervisory authorities of containing the...

This Technical Note provides an update on the Austrian insurance industry and an analysis of its regulatory and supervisory regime. The structure of the domestic insurance sector has remained largely stable since the last update. At Q3-2012 there were 50 insurance companies with assets of Euro...

This Technical Note covers the insurance sector of Italy supervised by the Institution for the Supervision of Insurance in Italy. Notwithstanding the high level of compliance with the International Association of Insurance Supervisors principles, critical principles remain to be taken on. Twenty...