The Relation between Insurance Development and Economic Growth in Iran

The role of the insurance sector and links into other financial sectors have grown in importance. The importance of financial institutions in economic growth, especially the role of stock markets and banks is greatly discussed in both theoretical and empirical studies, but the insurance sector has not received ample attention in this respect. We fill this gap by reviewing theory and empirical evidence and identify channels of influence. This book examines the existence of casual relation between insurance sector development and economic growth in Iran for the period 1960-2010. In this investigation we apply the Augmented Dickey-Fuller Unit Root test, the Johansen's Co-integration test and the Granger Causality Wald test based on Vector Auto Regression (VAR) model. According to our findings, there is a unidirectional causality relation from insurance development to economic growth. Therefore, insurance development is an important prerequisite for stimulating economic growth in Iran.The analysis should be useful to students and researchers in Economics and Management fields, and all institutions that are active in the economic development field, particularly insurance companies.