Introduction

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to try to understand the consequences of regulation and competition for insurance markets. Ideally this would involve asking, for each country, how performance under its current regulatory regime compares with what its performance would have been under a different regime, either competitive or with a different sort of regulation. For most countries, a direct investigation of this question is impossible: there is, for example, no unregulated Germany to compare with regulated Germany. Only in the United States, where some states were subject to regulations different from others, is such an approach possible, and the volume contains such a comparison.