Life insurance in India: The relationship between reforms and growth in business

Abstract

Reforms in the Indian life insurance sector began in 1999 and since then the growth of the life business has been impressive despite some restrictions. Whether the reforms in this sector have helped the industry to grow or not is an empirical matter. We, therefore, studied the relationship between life insurance sector reforms in India and the growth of life business in the post-reform period. At the empirical level, we first construct an index to measure the reforms and then used the VAR-VECM model to find out the long-run relationship. The Granger causality test suggests that life insurance sector reforms improved the overall development of life insurance development in recent years in India. © 2013 The International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics.