Investigating the Relationship between Non-Life Insurance and Economic Growth in Iran

Insurance sectors provide the main basis for the economic growth by the means of accumulation of resources and investigating them at macro-economic level. This study aims to examine the existence of a relationship between the growth of different non-life insurance lines and the economic growth in Iran. Most of the previous studies consider the insurance market as a whole, but in this study, the non-life insurance industry as our independent variable, has been broken up to different insurance lines that have a considerable proportion in Iran insurance industry.
By using econometric methodology, the data for the period of (1348-1393) were collected from the Iranian national data centers, then by estimating the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) along with several time series tests such as unit root test, optimum lag order selection test and granger causality test,, the econometric results indicate that all of the non-life insurance lines growth along with their total summations exhibit no significant relation with economic growth.As the results indicated that the non-life insurance lines don’t have any significant relation with economic growth, it is due to the inefficient performance in paying of losses, such as paying less than real amount or time consuming of settling the losses that cannot maintain financial stability for families. Also the technical reserves of these lines of insurance are not used effectively in capital markets. Briefly speaking, these factors totally cause that non-life insurances could not support the economic growth from two main channels of accumulation of capital and technical innovations.