The link between life insurance activities and economic growth: Some new evidence

This paper applies the panel seemingly unrelated regressions augmented Dickey-Fuller (SURADF) test to re-investigate the stationarity properties of real life insurance premiums per capita and real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for 41 countries within three levels of income covering 1979-2007. Our empirical results first reveal that the variables in these countries are a mixture of I(0) and I(1) processes, and that the traditional panel unit-root tests could lead to misleading inferences. Second, for the estimated half-lives, the degrees of mean reversion are greater in high-income countries. Third, there is concrete evidence favoring the hypothesis of a long-run equilibrium relationship between real GDP and real life insurance premiums after allowing for the heterogeneous country effect. The long-run estimated panel parameter results indicate that a 1% increase in the real life premium raises real GDP by 0.06%. Finally, we determine that the development of life insurance markets and economic growth exhibit long-run and short-run bidirectional causalities. These findings offer several useful insights for policy-makers and researchers. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.