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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 3

Publication Date: March 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.103.14208.

Wei, W., & Ming, L. (2023). Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Chinese Insurance Market Based on Reinsurance Networks. Advances

in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(3). 155-171.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Chinese Insurance Market Based

on Reinsurance Networks

Wang Wei

School of Insurance, University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China.

Liu Ming

School of Insurance, University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China.

Abstracts

Since the financial crisis in 2008, regulators around the world have been committed

to understanding and mitigating the potential systemic risks brought by the

insurance industry, focusing on the risk transmission field within the insurance

industry. This paper focuses on the possible transmission relationship of systemic

risk in China's insurance market through the reinsurance network from the

perspective of macro-prudential, discusses the accumulation and contagion effect

of systemic risk over time, and puts forward suggestions on the macro-prudential

supervision of China's insurance industry.

Keywords:insurance, systemic risks, network perspective

INTRODUCTION

Since the financial crisis in 2008, the insurance industry, as the main business of risk

management, had received a great deal of attention. Regulators around the world had been

working to understand and mitigate the potential systemic risks posed by the insurance

industry, with a focus on areas of risk transmission within the insurance industry. Most scholars

have analyzed the potential sources and transmission channels of systemic risk in the insurance

industry, with the most likely channel for spillover systemic risk from the insurance industry

being reinsurance business.

This paper focuses on the possible systemic risk transmission relationships in the Chinese

insurance market through the reinsurance network under a macro-prudential perspective,

explores the accumulation and contagion effects of systemic risk over time, analyzes the impact

of systemic risk contagion through the reinsurance channel in Chinese insurance market, and

provides some suggestions for the macro-prudential regulation of insurance in China.

This paper is organized as follows:section 2 provides a literature review; section 3 explains

the importance of reinsurance network; section 4 describes the current situation of the Chinese

reinsurance market; section 5 analyzes the network topology characteristics of the reinsurance

market, and reveals how systemic risk propagates and accumulates through the reinsurance

network; section 6 simulates the propagation of risk through the reinsurance network in the

insurance market when a shock occurs, based on the Ising model; section 7 discusses the policy

recommendations.

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LITERATURE REVIEW

Reinsurance is an important tool used by the insurance industry to transfer risk. The

reinsurance market has strengthened the linkages between financial institutions and further

amplified the systemic risk in the financial market. Acharya et al. (2009) proposed that

reinsurance strengthened the linkages among financial institutions and further amplified the

systemic risk in financial markets. Cummins et al. (2014) argued that the financial crisis or

bankruptcy of reinsurers would lead to the destabilization of the entire property insurance

market, causing insurance market failure, which in turn would bring damage to the entire

financial system and even the real economy. Park and Xie (2014) confirmed that centrally

located reinsurers had higher systemic risk. Kanno (2016) constructed an insurance network

model based on the maximum entropy principle and analyzed the structure of the insurance

network. Wang L. (2017) showed that from the perspective of risk contagion in insurance

business, domestic and foreign reinsurers were systemically important; small direct insurers

and some reinsurers with a higher share of ceded premiums had systemic vulnerability;

however, for Chinese insurance industry, the possibility of systemic risk occurring due to

reinsurance underwriting business was not high. Niu X. and Wu X. (2019) pointed out that in

recent years, due to their close ties with other insurance companies, some of the larger and

more complex domestic insurance institutions were in the central position in the reinsurance

network species and played a pivotal role in the stability and stability of Chinese overall

financial system and its ability to serve the real economy.Li F. et al.(2022)developed a network- based contagion model to investigate reinsurance strategy from a macro-prudential

perspective, showing a U-shaped relation with economic losses caused by risk spillovers.Other

influential works include Berdin et al.(2017),Chen H. et al(2020),Jourde T(2022).

THE IMPORTANCE OF REINSURANCE IN INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Reinsurance, as an important risk transfer instrument and risk management mechanism,

serves the following functions: (1) it disperses and transfers part of the risks underwritten by

the reinsurance institution, thus realizing the apportionment of sub-risk; (2) it helps control

the risk liability and uses the financial compensation function of insurance to compensate for

the losses incurred by the reinsurance institution due to insurance risks; (3) it enables the

reinsurance institution to expand its underwriting capacity; fourthly, it reduce the operating

costs of the sub-insurance agency. However, this process of business and activity can also lead

to increased interconnectedness among insurance institutions and an increasing aggregation

of risks among reinsurers, which can easily create systemic risks within the insurance market

through reinsurance business if a crisis occurs in any one or more institutions. Risk

diversification and restructuring mechanisms based on reinsurance contracts have become a

global network that transcends national borders. The risk transfer mechanism of reinsurance

also exists to provide a quick route of contagion for potential risk shocks and the consequences

of magnifying potential insurance risks. Such internal risk transmission channels and

modalities have become an important concern for global regulators.

Reinsurance stands on the top of the insurance network. Risk spillovers from the reinsurance

can lead to financial instability due to risk contagion within the wider insurance industry, and

may even have spillover effects and negative externalities on the economy as a whole. When

the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) conducts systemic importance

assessments, reinsurance is considered as an important factor in assessing risk transmission

among insurance institutions. As Acharya et al. (2009) argued, "reinsurance markets increase

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Wei, W., & Ming, L. (2023). Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Chinese Insurance Market Based on Reinsurance Networks. Advances in Social Sciences

Research Journal, 10(3). 155-171.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.103.14208

the interconnectedness of the system in an exponential manner and may therefore increase

systemic risk across the market". Indeed, credit risk from counterparties in reinsurance

transactions has been an important issue in their risk diversification and transmission, and

ceding companies are increasingly using special termination clauses with rating triggers in

their reinsurance contracts for risk mitigation purposes. This practice may actually exacerbate

the problem of “Reinsurance Spiral”. If a reinsurer's rating is lower below a certain threshold,

the clause will allow the major players to cancel the reinsurance policy, thus weakening an

already weak reinsurer and triggering a "reinsurance spiral", leading to a greater likelihood of

systemic risk.

Research has shown that reinsurance can generate systemic risk by increasing the

interconnectedness of risks through leverage and increasing contagion between insurance

institutions. Therefor, the study of systemic risk in insurance is crucial to the study of

reinsurance business linkage networks.

CURRENT SITUATION OF REINSURANCE BUSINESS IN CHINA

In order to analyze the impact of risk shocks on the reinsurance market, it is critical to

understanding the current situation of China's insurance reinsurance business. This section will

analyse Chinese current situation in the insurance industry market from the following

perspectives: the reinsurance institutions 、 the structure of ceded premium, and the

reinsurance payout ratio.

Information of Reinsurance Institutions

Prior to China's accession to WTO, there was only one reinsurance company in China, China Re.

Since 2003, with the continuous opening up of Chinese insurance industry, it has been

developing with great potential, attracting major professional reinsurance institutions all

around the world to set up branches in China, such as Munich Re and Swiss Re, etc. These

foreign reinsurance institutions entered the Chinese reinsurance market and undertook a large

amount of ceded reinsurance business. After the financial crisis in 2008, China accelerated the

establishment of Chinese reinsurance institutions in view of the growing demand for risk

diversification in the domestic insurance industry, and established PICC Re, Qianhai Re and

China Agricultural Re. Up to now, there are 15 reinsurance institutions in the Chinese insurance

market, including 8 foreign professional reinsurance institutions and 7 Chinese professional

reinsurance institutions1.

Structure of Ceded and Ceding Premium

The data shows that by the end of 2020, the total scale of premiums ceded from the original

insurance market in China was 244.183 billion, accounting for 5.68% of the original insurance

premium, rising up 2.12% from the previous year. The scale of ceded premium from property

and casualty (non-life) insurers remained stable relatively (as shown in Figure 1). The life

insurance industry's ceded premium rate was slightly 2% above the global life insurance

1 Although China Re Group has established China Life Reinsurance and China Property Reinsurance to operate life

insurance and non-life insurance reinsurance business respectively, according to the data in the China Insurance

Yearbook, China Re Group still handles reinsurance business separately and is therefore also considered a reinsurance

agency.

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average, while the non-life insurance industry's average ceded premium rate was 8.4% above

the global average2 .

Figure 1 Comparison of ceded premium ratio between life and non-life industry in China

Data source: the Yearbook of China’s Insurance (2015-2021), compiled and mapped by the author3

From the perspective of premium structure, the scale of reinsurance premium has increased

from about RMB 120 billion in 2013 to more than RMB 320 billion in 2020, increasing by more

than 2.69 times and with an annual average growth rate of 13.16% within 8 years in domestic

reinsurance market. In terms of ceded-out business, the ceded-out premium of original

insurance companies accounted for 75.69%, and that of professional reinsurance companies

accounted for 24.31%. By 2020, the ceded premium of professional reinsurance companies was

297.377-billion-yuan, accounting for 87.76% of the ceded business. The ceded premium of

original insurance companies was 41.495-billion-yuan, accounting for 12.24% of the ceded

premium (see Figure 2). It can be seen that China's reinsurance business is mainly underwritten

by domestic professional insurance institutions, with a relatively low level of

internationalization, far behind the world average. From the perspective of change trend, the

proportion of premium ceded by Chinese-funded professional reinsurance institutions had

been descending year by year since 2017, and slightly increased in 2020 (see Figure 3). The

reason may be that as China continued to promote economic globalization, the insurance

industry had always played a leading role in the opening up of the financial industry. With the

comprehensive opening up of the insurance industry, international reinsurance institutions

had accelerated their deployment in China, bringing more abundant funds and advanced

management experience to the reinsurance market in China.

2 Data source: Compiled from "Swiss Re sigma: Global Market Trends".

3 As the insurance industry started to implement the new accounting standards in 2012, they were fully implemented

in 2014. This led to inconsistencies in the calibre of reinsurance statistics prior to 2014, so only data from 2014 onwards

was selected for comparable analysis in this paper. In the modelling, the current year data was used for modelling and

therefore the comparability of the results is not affected.

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Wei, W., & Ming, L. (2023). Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Chinese Insurance Market Based on Reinsurance Networks. Advances in Social Sciences

Research Journal, 10(3). 155-171.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.103.14208

Figure 2 the ratio of premium underwritten by original insurance company and professional

reinsurance company

Data source: the Yearbook of China’s Insurance (2015-2021), compiled and mapped by the author.

Figure 3 the ratio of premium underwritten by foreign and domestic reinsurance company

Data source: the Yearbook of China’s Insurance (2015-2021), compiled and mapped by the author.

Reinsurance Payout in the Chinese Insurance Industry

The reinsurance payout ratio has always been an important indicator of the stability of the

reinsurance system (as shown in Figure 4). Reinsurance payout ratio was generally stable

except for 2016 when it was extremely high. The data shows that non-life reinsurance payout

ratio is higher than life insurance. There was an abnormal payout from Hannover Re in 2015

and 2016, which led to higher payout ratio of life reinsurance market as a whole. The life

reinsurance payout ratio remained at around 50% and the property reinsurance payout ratio

remained at around 55%, excluding the Hanover accident.

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Figure 4 reinsurance payout ratio between life and non-life insurance in China

Data source: the Yearbook of China’s Insurance (2015-2021), compiled and mapped by the author.

It is obvious that most of reinsurance contracts in the Chinese insurance industry originates

from domestic primary insurance institutions, while the international business is mainly

completed or ceded by international (professional) insurance institutions. In terms of ceded- out premium, primary insurance companies are mainly the risk ceded-out party and

professional reinsurance companies are mainly the ceded-in party. Foreign reinsurers are

gradually becoming the main ceded-in agents in the market, and China's original insurers are

also actively involved in the reinsurance industry, with relatively small premium sizes making

the correlation between the businesses relatively weak.

The predominant relationship between professional reinsurers and direct insurance

companies is unidirectional and vertical, i.e. professional reinsurers generally do not purchase

reinsurance sold by the original insurer or have relatively small volumes of this business, and

there is little correlation between professional reinsurers and the few horizontal

interconnectedness that may exist between reinsurers. To some extent, such a network

structure limits the potential impact of unexpected risks on the insurance industry as a whole,

and the likelihood that traditional reinsurance activities will have a negative and potentially

systemic impact on the industry as a whole is low. Even if it does, it is likely to be limited in the

insurance industry.

ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURE OF CHINESE REINSURANCE NETWORK BASED ON THE

PRINCIPLE OF MAXIMUM ENTROPY

As it is difficult to obtain accurate data on reinsurance contracts directly, this paper uses the

principle of maximum entropy and simulates Chinese network connections in the insurance

market through complex network, analyzing the network structure characteristics related to

reinsurance network at two levels: life insurance and non-life insurance (property and casualty

insurance) respectively.

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Wei, W., & Ming, L. (2023). Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Chinese Insurance Market Based on Reinsurance Networks. Advances in Social Sciences

Research Journal, 10(3). 155-171.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.103.14208

Given that reinsurance premiums are divided into ceded and ceded-out premiums, a

reinsurance directed network was constructed based on the reinsurance bilateral connection

matrix. The results of the model show that professional reinsurers are more likely to take in

risk from the original insurer than to cede risk. They also show that professional reinsurers

rarely share risk with each other, which is generally consistent with the results discussed in the

existing literature 5 . In addition, life insurers are more likely to take in risk than non-life

insurers, and non-life insurers are more likely to take out risk. This is mainly reflected in the

fact that life insurers are more likely to take in than non-life insurers, and the opposite is true

in terms of taking out. This finding is consistent with the structure of the reinsurance market in

practice, where professional reinsurers generally choose to underwrite reinsurance sold by the

original insurer due to the relatively vertical network of the reinsurance market, with the

possibility of a few horizontal linkages between professional reinsurers, but these are very

weak. In terms of the time dimension, the number of reinsurers receiving facultative business

has been relatively stable, with a sudden drop between 2015 and 2016 mainly due to the

increment of the reinsurers.

Network Centrality:

The centrality indicator captures the importance of insurance (reinsurance) institutions in the

market. In this paper, we select eigenvector centrality and betweenness centrality to analyze

the importance of the insurers(reinsurers).

The eigenvector centrality is used as an important indicator of the influence of the node in the

overall network. Based on the previous ideas of network construction, a reinsurance network

for the life and non-life insurance was established and analyzed for eigenvector centrality and

betweenness centrality as well as temporal changes (see Figure 7 and 8 for details).

Figure 7 the eigenvector centrality of the life insurers in the insurance market (2015-2020)

Figure 7 shows the change in the eigenvector centrality of the life reinsurance market from

2015 to 2020.the first row shows 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively, and the second row shows

2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively. 0-97 are the original insurer codes and 98-111 are the

5

International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS), Reinsurance and financial stability[R], Basel: International

Association of Insurance Supervisors, 2012: 10.

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reinsurer codes. As can be seen from Figure 7, over time, the risk concentration of the life

insurance reinsurance market presents a process from concentration to relative dispersion.

From the perspective of space, concentration means that in the life insurance reinsurance

market, after risk exchanges, market risk is mainly shared by several large insurance companies

and professional reinsurance companies; Diversification refers to that, compared with the

situation in which the market risks were mainly concentrated in professional reinsurance

institutions in 2015, after five years of development, the main market risk pattern has changed

into multiple large insurance companies and professional reinsurance companies sharing

market risks. In terms of time, with the development of the market, the risks assumed by each

risk-bearing entity are increasing, and the number of risk-bearing entities has also increased,

and the degree of risk concentration has decreased, showing a certain trend of diversification.

Figure 8 the eigenvector centrality of the non-life insurers in the insurance market (2015-

2020)

It is slightly different from the situation of life insurance companies, as shown in Figure 8. The

horizontal axis 0 to 76 in the figure is the code of non-life insurance institutions, and 77 to 89

is the code of reinsurance institutions. From the perspective of space, in the reinsurance

network of non-life insurance, the risk concentration showed a trend of gradually sharing to

the whole market from 2015 to 2020, and the relative scores between nodes were relatively

close. Although a large number of risks are still concentrated in professional reinsurance

companies, their risk allocation is more average than that of life insurance reinsurance

networks. This indicates that the non-life insurance reinsurance network is more likely to have

the risk caused by the default of the reinsurance contract than the life insurance reinsurance

network, thus inducing the systemic risk, which spreads in a waterfall manner in the whole

non-life insurance market.

In terms of betweenness centrality, the betweenness centrality of the reinsurance network is

shown in Figure 9. As with the eigenvector centrality, the betweenness centrality of the

reinsurance network in the life insurance market is also concentrated in several large original

insurance companies and professional reinsurance companies. Such results show that if the

crisis occurs in small life insurance institutions, as long as there is no fatal impact on these large

insurance institutions and professional reinsurance institutions, there is a great chance that

large insurance institutions and professional reinsurance institutions will become effective risk

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Wei, W., & Ming, L. (2023). Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Chinese Insurance Market Based on Reinsurance Networks. Advances in Social Sciences

Research Journal, 10(3). 155-171.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.103.14208

blocking points and isolate risks from other institutions. However, just like the two sides of the

coin, if the crisis occurs in these large insurance institutions and professional reinsurance

institutions, its intermediary effect will amplify the impact of the crisis, make the crisis spread

quickly to the entire network, and bring fatal damage to the entire insurance market. This also

confirms that IMF, BIS and FSB (2009), Geneva Association (2010) and IAIS (2010) put forward

the characteristics of measuring the scale and interrelation of systemic risk.

Figure 9 the betweenness centrality of the life insurers in the insurance market (2015-2020)

Analysis of the intermediary centrality of the reinsurance network in the non-life insurance

market (shown in Figure 10) is compared to the reinsurance network in the life insurance

market. While specialist reinsurers take on some intermediary functions, the main network

intermediaries are concentrated in the non-life primary insurers. This suggests, on the one

hand, that risk sharing in the non-life network is more balanced and that when a crisis arises in

one institution, the entire network can assume the risk in a balanced manner. But on the other

hand, it also indicates that non-life market networks have fewer risk-blocking points compared

to life market networks, and that in the event of a large-scale risk outbreak, most institutions

in the network would be affected by the shock and thus have a higher likelihood of systemic

risk. This is closely related to the business activities engaged in by non-life insurance

institutions. Some credit guarantee businesses could be potential triggers of systemic risk.

Figure 10 the betweenness centrality of the non-life insurers in the insurance market (2015-

2020)