First-time insurance buyers of all age brackets invariably choose to buy accident insurance, according to a study carried out by China Pacific and the international professional services firm, PwC.
For young people and the elderly, the second choice of insurance product is health insurance while the middle-aged people choose life insurance, says the report “China Insurance Consumer White Paper”. Data for the white paper was extracted from China Pacific's customer database.
The paper looked at nine major insurance areas, namely, health, accident, critical illness, life, pension, education, wealth, motor and family finance. The parameters studied included product mix, level, expenditure, cost, gender, geographical location, personal characteristics and family features, reports the China News Agency citing the paper.
The study shows that men form the main insurance consumer segment. While awareness of insurance has increased among women in the past several years, women still lag far behind men in being the decision maker for insurance purchases.
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From the perspective of age, those born in the 1980s have the strongest insurance awareness and form the main consumer force. For instance, of all insurance buyers in 2017, those aged 31-40 accounted for 29.7% of the total; followed by those aged 41-50 at 21.8% and those in the 25-30 age bracket at 21.4%.
Geographical differences were obvious from dimensions such as the number of insurance buyers, average premium per capita and average number of insurance policies, etc. Insurance awareness is higher in coastal and economically prosperous parts of the country, with the proportion in eastern China reaching nearly 40%. It is lower in the western regions although there has been an improvement in the awareness level in recent years.
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The white paper also shows that as affluence grows in China, the average spending per capita on insurance has also increased, particularly for education plans, reflecting Chinese parents' willingness to give their children a helping hand in academic pursuits.
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