Assessing wartime insurance resilience: Development and application of the insurance market wartime resilience index

Abstract

The functioning of insurance markets during prolonged military conflict remains insufficiently explored in contemporary insurance and risk management literature. The purpose of this study is to develop and apply the Insurance Market Wartime Resilience Index (IMWRI) for assessing insurance market resilience under conditions of military conflict. The empirical calibration combines indicators from both the non-life and life insurance segments; however, the dominant contribution comes from non-life insurance data. Consequently, the resulting IMWRI should be interpreted as a market-wide resilience measure with a stronger sensitivity to developments in the non-life segment. The proposed IMWRI integrates five dimensions of wartime insurance market functioning: premium resilience, claims functionality, reinsurance support, solvency and financial stability, and market structure adaptation. The empirical results demonstrate that the Ukrainian insurance market produces an approximate IMWRI value of 67.9%. The largest contributions are generated by premium resilience (0.2625) and solvency and financial stability (0.2325), followed by market structure and concentration (0.0893) and claims functionality (0.0780). The smallest contribution is provided by reinsurance support (0.0165). This distribution suggests that wartime insurance resilience in Ukraine is driven primarily by internal market capacity and financial stability rather than by external risk-transfer mechanisms. The proposed IMWRI confirms that resilience is generated through a combination of financial stability, premium continuity, institutional adaptation, and selective risk transfer. Therefore, the future development of wartime insurance systems depends not only on strengthening insurers themselves but also on building integrated public-private risk-sharing mechanisms capable of narrowing the gap between market resilience and protection needs.