Mirela Cristea

The Relationship between Insurance and Economic Growth in Romania Compared to the Main Results in Europe – A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Abstract The correlation between insurance and economic growth has been analyzed by many authors at the international level, thus there are a lot of studies seeking to assess the causal relation between macroeconomic performance and the size of the insurance sector. The insurance becomes a major component in certain economies, consequently the weight of insurance to the GDP of every country being over 10% in some European countries (such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Finland), and it is even higher as the economic development is higher. We can say that the percentage in GDP of a country is the measure of the development of that respective state. The purpose of this paper is to establish the correlation between insurance and economic growth in Romania, by taking into consideration the share of gross premium written to GDP (insurance penetration), and the average value of the insurance premium paid by an inhabitant across one year (insurance density), as insurance indicators. The methodology of our research employs statistical methods concerning the analysis between the GDP and insurance indicators. The results obtained will be compared with those obtained on other markets.

The efficiency of the green taxes as instruments for environmental protection.

This paper focused on the green taxes, great actuality issue in the contemporary world. As research method, the paper is based on economical theory of externalities, their presence making the company to take decisions with different social effects. Starting from social cost and private cost of human activity, it is a debate regarding the internalization of external costs by applying the corrective taxes. The purpose of this paper it is the establishing of an optimal tax level which has as effect the decreasing of the overall cost of a negative externality (for example, the pollution) through controlling the external effects. Deriving from the analysis it has been disclosed that ideally the environmental taxes should be introduced over externalities source, meaning that taxes should report directly over emissions or environment services.