Cykle ubezpieczeniowe w Europie Środkowej
Insurance cycles in Central Europe

Summary/Abstract: The underwriting cycle is defined as alternating periods of hard markets and soft markets. Most of the research confirming the existence of cycles on the well-developed insurance market relies on the time series behaviour of published underwriting information on loss ratios and underwriting profits. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the insurance markets of four Central European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic, forming the Visegrad Group (V4), are cyclical in nature. If a cycle is found, we also investigate the cycle length. We analyzed loss ratios data for the period 1993- 2010. A second-order autoregressive model proposed by Venezian [1985] is used to obtain the parameters for testing for the existence of the underwriting cycle. We partly confirmed the existence of cycles for these markets, however, the best results are for the Czech Republic. The average length of the cycle is in the range of 5-9 years.

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