China

Axco provides details on the life insurance sector including Chinese market participants, reinsurance and distribution channels. The reports describe classes of business from both individual and group life such as whole life, endowment, term life and unit-linked.
Information on non-life classes for example critical illness and private medical insurance.

The report describes the public and private healthcare system in China, the scope of cover, accessibility financing and provides an analysis of how the public and private systems complement each other.

Axco reports on the three pillars of Chinese pension provision.

• State pension benefits including benefit calculations and eligibility criteria 
• Workplace pension provision; types of schemes calculations eligibility and; tax implications
• Voluntary individual pension provision, type of products and tax implications

The China report provides an in-depth analysis of the regulatory framework governing social security as well as details on financing and eligibility. Information includes but is not limited to

• state pensions,
• permanent disability benefit
• occupational accident and disease
• maternity and paternity payments 

Because of its huge population and consistently high rates of real GDP growth, China has leapfrogged Japan to become the second-largest life market in the world after the US with premiums of CNY 2.96trn (USD 422.48bn) in 2019. Growth is driven by rapidly rising living standards, urbanisation, and the need to provide for retirement and ill health.

The Chinese market is largely self-contained and has developed according to a unique cultural and political dynamic in which entrepreneurship, recklessness and government ....

China has a three-pillar pension system for employees. The first and largest pillar is local social funds financed by employer contributions of up to 16% of wages. The second pillar comprises company pensions and employees' personal accumulation accounts which are funded by mandatory contributions of 8% of wages. The third pillar is voluntary savings.

Although a legal framework for company pensions was introduced as far back as 2004, company pension schemes are rare: it seems that only 6% of the urban workforce are enrolled in regulated schemes (though a possibly higher percentage may be enrolled in unregulated schemes). 

Although the number of private healthcare facilities now exceeds the number of public hospitals, the provision of healthcare, particularly for chronic or serious illness, remains dominated by the state sector. State primary care is undeveloped, however, requiring patients with even minor illnesses to queue for an appointment at a state hospital. This inefficient system is rapidly being overtaken by the development of telemedicine by both public and private healthcare providers. State hospitals are partly financed by government, but mainly operate on a "fee for services" basis. A growing proportion of patients' hospital costs are reimbursed by the social security system, but there are still significant unreimbursed expenses which must be paid from patients' private resources or by a rapidly ....