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In the pandemic, insurers can absorb customer health and life claims, but not business losses from lockdown measures
An Investigation into the Insurability of Pandemic Risk
- Life and health risks for pandemics similar to COVID-19 are insurable: they are generally non-systemic and modellable.
- Property & casualty (P&C) insurers, on the other hand, would have to collect business interruption policy premiums for 150 years to make up for projected global output losses in 2020 related to COVID-19.
An Investigation into the Insurability of Pandemic Risk
This first report in our research series on pandemics and insurance explores, in number terms, the capacities of insurers to absorb pandemic-related costs. Encouragingly, research findings indicate that pandemics on the scale of, and similarly lethal to, COVID-19 pose no fundamental insurability challenges for health and life insurers. In the commercial insurance arena, however, the uncontrollable aggregation and correlation elements of pandemic risk defy insurability.
The Role of Insurance in Mitigating Social Inequality
COVID-19’s present and foreseeable social and economic impacts are a call to invigorate and recalibrate discussions to address social inequality and explore new approaches driven by public-private partnerships. Private insurance, though not designed to address social inequality per se, can offer financial relief to people or households when calamities strike. Such shocks hit the poorest the hardest.
COVID-19 conversations: The post-COVID-19 risk landscape
The COVID-19 pandemic, even after we overcome it, will have lasting effects on people, businesses and governments across the globe.
Kai-Uwe Schanz, Deputy Managing Director and Head of Research & Foresight, anticipates that the post-COVID-19 risk landscape will probably more digital than physical and more local than global. In all likelihood, resilience, rather than short-term economic gain, will drive public and private policy agendas.
This is the fifth video in our series #COVID19conversations #GAHomeOffice2020.
The Role of Trust in Narrowing Protection Gaps
This report's comprehensive analysis of the role and nature of trust in insurance, with a focus on the retail segment, offers important insights into how to narrow the protection gap—the difference between needed and available protection—through concerted multistakeholder efforts.
Insurers can leverage behavioral economics to address the protection gap
Applying behavioral economics can help reduce the enormous barrier to people buying insurance – their cognitive biases – that causes the protection gap.
This interview accompanies the research report Underinsurance in Mature Economies: Reasons and remedies. It was conducted on the sidelines of the 46th Annual General Assembly in Buenos Aires.
Building trust is key to addressing underinsurance in mature markets: Geneva Association customer survey
Insurance protection gaps in mature markets could be narrowed by reinforcing trust in insurers, reveals a survey commissioned by The Geneva Association. The research report Underinsurance in Mature Economies: Reasons and remedies distils a number of takeaways from the survey's results and proposes a framework of five factors that influence underinsurance: institutions, sociodemographics, economics, behavior and culture.
Underinsurance in Mature Economies: Reasons and remedies
Contrary to general belief, protection gaps are not limited to developed and emerging countries but are also common in advanced economies. A customer survey of The Geneva Association in seven mature economies revealed that people widely understand the fundamental notion of insurance and its vital role in the economy and society. However, people have deep misperceptions about the insurance industry and its products. Addressing this disconnect will be vital to encouraging a wider adoption of insurance in mature economies.
