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To cite this article: Zhengru Tao , Desheng Dash Wu , Zhenlong Zheng & Xiaxin Tao (2010) Earthquake
Insurance and Earthquake Risk Management, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International
Journal, 16:3, 524-535, DOI: 10.1080/10807031003788634
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10807031003788634
ABSTRACT
The Wenchuan earthquake is the largest devastating earthquake striking China
since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. In this catastrophe, loss payments were mainly
from the government and public endowment. The insurance industry is expected
to take more responsibility in the future, since earthquake insurance is one of the
most effective and equitable instruments to disperse earthquake losses. In this article, earthquake risk management and the development of earthquake insurance in
China are reviewed. Earthquake insurance is suggested as an instrument in earthquake risk management, where the premium rate of earthquake insurance is a key
factor that needs to be determined reasonably. Seismic hazard is analyzed for the
Wenchuan earthquake-stricken area, and is combined with primary loss estimation
to construct the exceeding probability curve. Earthquake insurance premium rates
are calculated for buildings in the area, including RC (Reinforced Concrete), frame,
and brick, corresponding to two kinds of insurance deductible.
Key Words:
Wenchuan earthquake, earthquake insurance, earthquake risk management, engineering seismic risk assessment.
INTRODUCTION
At 14:28 (Beijing time) on May 12, 2008, an earthquake with magnitude M
= 8.0 occurred in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province, China, which is a rural
and mountainous region in western China. The epicenter was located at 31 00 N
and 103 24 E, about 80 km west of Chengdu, the Sichuan province capital, and
the epicentral depth was 14 km. Neighbor cities such as Mianzhu, Guangyuan,
Mianyang, and Dujiangyan, even Chengdu, were damaged extensively. Almost all
provinces in China felt the shock, because of the shallow epicenter and the stiff soil
and rocks surrounding the fault, the seismic waves traveled far with less energy loss.
Address correspondence to Desheng Dash Wu, Reykjavik University, Kringlunni 1, IS-103
Reykjavk, Iceland and RiskLab, University of Toronto, 1 Spadina Crescent, Toronto, ON,
Canada M5S 3G3. E-mail: DWu@rotman.utoronto.ca
524
It was the largest devastating earthquake striking China after the 1976 Tangshan
earthquake. The official report released by the State Council Information Office
of the P. R. China indicated that 69,226 people died, 17,923 were missing, and
374,643 were injured, as of September 11, 2008 (www.xinhuanet.com, 2008b). The
direct economic loss was estimated as 845.1 billion RMB, in which 91.3% was from
Sichuan Province (www.xinhuanet.com, 2008a). Although the Chinese government
and people responded as quickly as possible, there are still some improvements on
earthquake risk management that could be accomplished. The insurance industry
is expected to take more responsibility in such future catastrophes.
In some countries, earthquake peril is insured. For example, earthquake insurance is mandatory, and is included in every fire policy written by the private insurance companies in France, New Zealand, and Spain. Both California and Japan
have a governmentprivate shared separate policy for household risks. Purchase of
such insurance is voluntary. Australia and Italy leave the insuring of the earthquake
peril to the private insurance industry (Richard 1999; Walker 2000; Smolka 2000).
The Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP) starting operations in late 2000
and compulsory earthquake insurance scheme provide coverage for all residential
buildings that fall within municipal boundaries (Smolka 2000; Spence et al. 2002).
In 2003, Indonesia launched an initiative to promote insurance coverage for natural
disasters by requiring all licensed general insurance and reinsurance operators to
cooperate in insuring special risks through a joint undertaking of all companies
known as the Indonesian Earthquake Reinsurance Pool or PRGBI (Pool Reasuransi
Gempa Bumi Indonesia) (Silaban and Hadi 2008).
For the buildings in areas affected by the Wenchuan earthquake, earthquake
insurance premium rates are determined in this article, based on seismic hazard
analysis and primary loss estimation from the earthquake.
EARTHQUAKE RISK MANAGEMENT IN CHINA
In China, it is the primary liability of local governments to organize relevant departments to act rapidly and effectively for earthquake disaster under the uniform
decision of the central government. Local chief officers must be on the scene to
direct and coordinate manpower, appliances, and materials, and communicate with
superiors and rescuers if a devastating earthquake occurs. There are three branches
of forces that play roles in rescue, recovery, and reconstruction: (1) administrative departments with perfect organization, chain of command and corresponding
rights; (2) disaster prevention and reduction systems, which have been established
during the last 40 years, and even local earthquake administrations already have
had advanced instruments on earthquake monitoring and forecast; and (3) experts
and researchers who study the mechanism, the characteristics, and the rules of
earthquakes, and suggest countermeasures.
The current earthquake risk management system in China is founded under the
planned economy, so some limitations and problems are exposed in the progress
of economy development and reformation to the market system in the country, especially after entered into the World Trade Organization (WTO). For example, the
info-sharing systems of earthquake disasters among various branches are imperfect,
the support of advanced technology is not well built in emergency decisions, and the
Hum. Ecol. Risk Assess. Vol. 16, No. 3, 2010
525
Z. Tao et al.
distance from the epicenter less than 10 km, are all met. Until now, it has not been
shown in any report that this insurance policy worked in the Wenchuan earthquake.
Since the insurance industry in the country is in the developing stage, premium
increases every year and the claim rate is low, the profit of insurers is getting higher, so
insurers, to some extent, weakened the sense of reinsurance. Actually, risk will be accumulated quickly as the expansion of business, and the stabilization of insurers, will
be threatened, which means there must be a great demand of a reinsurance market.
It was prescribed in the former LAW OF INSURANCE that 20% of each business from insurers must be reinsured to the China Reinsurance Company. This
was contributed to the development of reinsurance (Li and Wang 2006). According to the WTO commitments, the proportion of mandatory reinsurance should
be reduced 5% each year, which means there would be no mandatory reinsurance
in 2006. Meanwhile, Swiss Re and Munich Re have entered the market (Tian and
Wang 2003). In order to retain the market competitive edge, Chinese insurers have
to expand the coverage. Catastrophe insurance issued already by these transnational (re)insurers is in insistent demand. It is also a necessary instrument from the
evolution of catastrophe risk management.
INSURANCE INDUSTRY IN THE WENCHUAN EARTHQUAKE
In this catastrophe, the loss payments are mainly from all levels of governments
and public endowment. As of September 11, 2008, the disaster relief fund from
the former was 67.554 billion RMB, in which 60.087 billion was from the central
finance and 7.467 billion was from the local finance, and the value of disaster relief
materials from the latter was 59.348 billion RMB (www.xinhuanet.com, 2008b).
Facing such a catastrophe, insurers claimed the losses generously. For example,
the excluded liability of earthquake risk in the clauses of some life insurances was
ignored (www.circ.gov.cn). The claim payoffs of the insurance industry, varying over
time, are shown in Figure 1. One can see there are two segments where the payoffs
increase quickly. One is 717 days after the earthquake, and the other is 3670
Figure 1.
The claim payoffs of the insurance industry to the Wenchuan earthquake. (Data from the China Insurance Regulatory Commission website,
2008.)
527
Z. Tao et al.
Figure 2.
days. The former is for the stabilization of the society, and the latter is for the
reconstruction.
The proportion of insured losses, including property loss and life loss, to total
losses in this earthquake is shown in Figure 2. In this figure, (a) describes the
proportions of relief funds to direct economic loss; (b) describes the proportions of
insured death to total death; and (c) describes the proportions of insured injuries
to total injuries.
Since a piece of total losses was insured, the exposure of the insurance industry
to this event was still small. Both the proportion of property loss to direct economic
loss and that of insured injuries to total injuries are less than 1%. This is a harsh
reminder of enforcing earthquake insurance as an instrument in earthquake risk
management, preparing for the next earthquake.
PREMIUM RATE-MAKING
Many approaches have been developed to determine earthquake premiums.
The approach based on engineering seismic risk assessment (Tao and Tao 2004)
528
is adopted to calculate the premium rates for the buildings in the Wenchuan
earthquake-stricken area.
Pure Premium Rate
According to the property insurance premium rate-making approach (Zhang and
Zheng 2002), the pure premium rate for buildings is defined as
Pure premium rate = Expected loss ratio (1.0 + Safety loading),
(1)
where Expected loss ratio is related with structural characters and seismic hazard,
and is described as
E S (RL ) =
5
11
p (I ) p S (Dk |I ) RS (Dk ),
(2)
I =6 k=1
where PS (Dk |I ) is the conditional probability of Sth type buildings being in kth
damage state given intensity from primary loss estimation in this article; RS (DK ) is
the loss ratio of Sth type buildings being in kth damage state, which is the ratio of the
repair cost of Sth type buildings being in kth damage state to the reconstruction cost;
p (I ) is the occurring possibility of intensity I , and can be derived from P (I i), the socalled seismic hazard. The latter depends on the regional seismic environment and
attenuation relationship of ground motion, and is generally referred to as the seismic
hazard curve. In nature, earthquake intensity is a sequential classified variable, so
P (I i) is not really a continuous curve. Surely, intensity I can be substituted with
other
ground motion parameter Y , by this way, the symbol must be substituted
to , then P (Y > y) is a continuous curve.
According to the Total Probability Theorem, the probability that intensity I
greater than given value i at a site, from all the earthquakes in ith potential source
area with magnitude in jth magnitude interval, can be calculated from Eq. (3),
Pij (I i) =
(3)
n=0
(4)
n=0
where Eij is for the condition of one earthquake occurs in the ith potential source
area with magnitude in the jth magnitude interval; n is the number of earthquakes;
Pij (n) is the probability of n earthquakes occurs in the ith potential source area with
magnitude in the jth magnitude interval.
Under the hypothesis of independence, the probability of n earthquakes occurring in given period t can be calculated by
P (n) = Ctn P n (1 P )tn .
(5)
tn n
(P t)n
P (1 P )t =
(1 P )t .
n!
n!
(6)
529
Z. Tao et al.
(i j t)n i j t
,
e
n!
(7)
where ij is the annual probability of one earthquake occurring in the ith potential
source area with magnitude in the jth magnitude interval.
Substituting Eq. (7) into Eq. (4), the result is
Pij (I i) = 1.0 e i j t
n=0
Then, the probability that intensity I greater than given value i, from all the
earthquakes in all potential source areas with magnitudes in all magnitude intervals,
can be expressed by
P (I i) = 1.0 e
Figure 3(a).
530
i
i j tP (I i|E i j )
(9)
Figure 3(b).
where P (I i|Eij ) depends on the attenuation relationship and is related with the
type of potential source areas.
In general, P (I ) is calculated by
P (I ) = P (I i) P (I i + 1).
(10)
In some cases, the P (I ) may be less than P (I +1), if I is low. The reason is that Eq.
(10) is exactly correct only under the condition of one earthquake occurring. Dealing with the aforementioned procedure, one can find that P (I i) is contributed
by earthquakes in many potential source areas with various magnitudes and various
occurring times. It means that P (I i) consists of not only P (I = i) and P (I i + 1),
but also P (I = i and I > i). The later cannot be ignored in earthquake active regions
for intensities less than VII and long evaluated periods, like 50 or 100 years. So the
exceeding probability in short period t can be calculated firstly from the hazard in
long period T by
t
Pt (I i) = 1 [1 PT (I i)] T .
(11)
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Z. Tao et al.
Figure 4.
Obviously, P (I = i and I > i) can be ignored when the period is short. Say,
one month is short enough for a general region; for a region with high seismisity,
like the Wenchuan-stricken area, it must be shortened to days. Here, the occurring
probability (t = 0.01) can be obtained by
Pt (I = i) = Pt (I i) Pt (I i + 1).
(12)
PT (I = i) = 1 [1 Pt (I = i)] t .
(13)
Safety loading denotes the volatility of loss ratio data to reduce the instability and
transfer more risk to policyholders. So the safety loading here is defined as the ratio
of the deviation of loss ratio to the median. Then, Eq. (1) can be rewritten as
Pure premium rate = Expected loss ratio + Deviation.
Table 1.
Intensity
Structure type
XI+
RC frame
Brick
Normalized
RC frame
Brick
Normalized
RC frame
Brick
Normalized
RC frame
Brick
Normalized
VIII
VII
VI
532
(14)
Collapse
Heavy
Medium
Slight
None
13.06
29.32
21.19
3.8
10.81
7.31
0.3
2.95
1.63
0
0.91
0.46
14.84
18.77
16.81
19.35
21.89
20.62
1.75
5.37
3.56
0.3
1.94
1.12
22.86
44.95
33.91
24.7
23.73
24.22
5.99
10.58
8.29
2.13
4.32
3.23
21.01
6.49
13.75
20.78
19.26
20.02
9.64
26.4
18.02
5.27
10.28
7.78
28.23
0.47
14.35
31.37
24.31
27.84
82.32
54.7
68.51
92.3
82.55
87.42
Figure 5.
Deductable
There are two kinds of deductable in this article. One is absolute deductable,
which is a proportion of insured value. Then, the risk taken by insurers is that of the
loss over the deductable and pure premium rate is
Pure premium rate = Expected loss ratio Exceeding probability + Deviation,
(15)
where Exceeding probability is the probability of loss ratio exceeding the deductable,
which can be interpolated on the exceeding probability curve. The loss ratio of the
Sth type buildingsLS (I ), given intensity I , is
LS (I ) =
5
p S (Dk |I ) RS (Dk ).
(16)
k=1
Table 2.
Deductable
0
3%
5%
10%
20%
50%
(17)
Premium rate
(Safety loading 20%)
Premium rate
(Safety loading 50%)
1.7532
0.4838
0.4751
0.4591
0.4562
0.4526
2.1039
0.5806
0.5702
0.5510
0.5475
0.5432
2.6299
0.7258
0.7127
0.6887
0.6843
0.6790
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Z. Tao et al.
Table 3.
Deductable
0
3%
5%
10%
20%
50%
Pure premium
rate
Premium rate
(Safety loading 20%)
Premium rate
(Safety loading 50%)
1.7532
1.7142
1.6882
1.6232
1.4931
1.1029
2.1039
2.0571
2.0259
1.9478
1.7917
1.3235
2.6299
2.5713
2.5323
2.4348
2.2397
1.6544
DESIGN PRODUCTIONS
For reconstruction, the seismic ground motion parameter zonation map of the
Wenchuan earthquake-stricken as a part of the zonation map of China, was revised
by the Editorial Committee of National Seismic Zonation Map, shown in Figure 3.
Some important potential sources in this area were demonstrated and modified,
and the ground motion parameters of potential sources were adjusted also. So the
seismic hazard curve is shown in Figure 4.
Today, it is more than one year after the earthquake, losses estimation has been
finished. However, the final report on losses has not been published, so the accurate
vulnerability evaluation and details on losses cannot be obtained. Losses estimation
(Yuan 2008), adopted here, is listed in Table 1. Then, the exceeding probability
curve of losses ratio is constructed and shown in Figure 5.
Deductable is designed as 0, 3%, 5%, 10%, 20%, or 50%, and safety loading is
20% or 50% of the pure premium rate. Thus, earthquake insurance premium rates
of buildings in the Wenchuan earthquake-stricken area, including frame, brick and
RC, can be calculated from Eq. (15), corresponding to the first kind of deductibles,
listed in Table 2. For the second kind of deductibles, premium rate can be obtained
from Eq. (17), and listed in Table 3.
CONCLUSION
After the Wenchuan earthquake, it is clear that earthquake insurance should
be adopted as an instrument in earthquake disaster management. In this article,
we have discussed the premium rate-making based on seismic hazard analysis and
primary loss estimation from the Wenchuan earthquake. Past experiences suggest
that it is dangerous for the insurance industry to insure such a great catastrophe.
In contrast, the capital market can provide (re)insurers with big financing capacity,
where insurers usually are offered with specific vehicles to disperse various risks. For
the management of the next possible devastating earthquake in China, catastrophe
insurance derivatives are suggested as supplements of earthquake insurance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by Basic Scientific Research Foundation of Institute of Engineering Mechanics for Special Operations (No.2006B05), National Nature Science
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