Solvency II Directive and the Key Features of the European Insurance Market

This chapter describes the Solvency II Directive (2009/138/EC), which is the regulatory framework for the European insurance industry. This chapter also provides statistics on the European insurance market, and introduces a sample of European insurance companies that is used in the next chapters for providing empirical evidence of the theoretical topics analysed. Thus, this chapter has three main goals: describing the characteristics, principles, and aims of the regulatory framework of Solvency II; identifying the key features of the European insurance market and distinguishing between life and non-life insurance activities providing statistics for both; selecting a sample of European insurers that can be used to empirically test the theoretical topics analysed in the subsequent chapters of this book. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.