Resilience Analysis of the European Insurance Industry

Abstract The insurance market does not generate only a risk dispersion tool, but constitutes a complex system that contributes to the efficient and effective functioning of the economy. In order to guarantee the fundamental role of this market in sustainable economic growth, insurers must prove resilience in the face of risk and uncertainty generated by the complexity of the system of interdependencies in which they operate. The purpose of the article is to analyze the resilience of the European insurance market, its adaptability to changes and the recovery of delays caused by recent health (especially the COVID-19 pandemic). The data used include variables that define the European insurance system (such as gross written premiums, gross claims incurred, total technical expenses, total assets, total liabilities and number of entities) from EIOPA’s annual statistics from 2017 to2023. Analysis tools include cluster analysis to evaluate the dissimilarity and similarity of European Union countries. The resilience of the insurance industry to shocks was also analyzed from the perspective of financial performance by using a clusterization analysis in order to group countries based on Euclidean distance. The results indicate a grouping of countries in two clusters whose composition remained relatively stable to shocks.