Insurance: Trends of Use in the Republic of North Macedonia

Abstract

Insurance supports a healthy and prosperous society, enabling businesses and individuals to protect themselves, property, and their finances against risk. As such, insurance today is not just important for the individual consumer, business client or businesses; it also has consequences for the entire economy, restoring businesses to health after natural disasters, acts of war, riots, strikes, fluctuations or financial crises, and state measures to dictate the import or export of goods. The aim of this paper is to examine the part played by insurance in the economy of the Republic of North Macedonia. This paper introduces and summarises an argument and outlines the nature of the exploration to follow. For this introductory purpose, referencing in the paper is kept deliberately light; aiming to find discussion points of relevant sources in the course of the argument as it unfolds. We argue that insurance operates not at the periphery, but also at the core of development, in both practical and conceptual terms. Research of the space that insurance occupies and the role that insurance has in general welfare is performed by using the legal platform that insurance has in place, including the Law on Obligations, the Law on Insurance Supervision, and the Law on Compulsory Traffic Insurance. Through the method of analysis, synthesis, and statistics, the author processes the official data of the Ministry of Finance presented by the National Bank, in order to provide a clear overview of the trends in the use of insurance in the Republic of North Macedonia. The results from the study show that in the time period analysed, the insurance sector is classifi ed as the third most important segment in the financial system, and that life insurance prevails over other types of insurance.