Insurance Market Development and Economic Growth in Transition Countries: Some New Evidence Based on the Bootstrap Panel Granger Causality Test

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate causal relations between the insurance market development and economic growth in ten transition European Union member countries in the period between 1993 and 2013. The analysis is conducted with the use of the bootstrap panel causality approach proposed by Kónya (2006), which allows for the simultaneous inclusion of both cross-sectional dependence and country-specific heterogeneity. Various types of dependencies between economic growth and the insurance market development (both in terms of the global insurance market and in the division into life insurance and non-life insurance) are identified in the study, and these findings confirm the results obtained in the majority of other papers which report differences in the role of insurance and the benefits various economies derive from the insurance market.(original abstract)