The ageing population, dependency burdens and household commercial insurance purchase: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This paper presents evidence that dependency burdens play a key role in commercial insurance market in China. It is found that the child dependency ratio has a positive effect on the households’ demand for commercial insurance, whereas the old-age dependency ratio has the negative effect. Furthermore, child dependency ratio of the eastern and high-income households in China has a larger influence on commercial insurance purchase, while the old-age dependency ratio has the less impact. Our findings provide useful insights for the important issue of the ageing population and low birth-rate in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Dependency burden
• child dependency ratio
• old-age dependency ratio
• commercial insurance

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G22
• J10
• D10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Excluding Xinjiang and Tibet.

² Regions are defined according to the three-grouping classification provided by the China National Bureau of Statistics: East, Middle and West.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [16BMZ114]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in UIBE [18QN04].