Insurance Company Performance within the Framework of Trade Agreements

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of regional integration on insurance companies' performance to assess whether integration is always favorable for the insurance market. In exi­sting literature, the most common method of evaluating the impact of integration on insurance companies has been observing how certain indicators change over time and attributing these changes to integration, with another approach consisting of using the share of the insurance lines mostly subject to foreign competition as an explanatory variable. The results, however, are mixed. As a measure of the degree of integration, we use the share of imports from other countries that are members of the trade agreement in the country's imports of direct insurance services. The evaluation is carried out using data on 64 companies from Canada, Mexico and the United States from 2005 to 2016, then verified using data on 145 companies spanning 2005– 2018. The production function is assumed to be translog. It is shown that a higher share of other member countries in the imports of direct insurance services leads to an increase in the operating expenses incurred by life insurance companies and a decrease in the operating expenses incurred by international companies, while there is no statistically significant impact on the profits of most types of companies.