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Economist Mircea Cosea says that in a country like Romania, reaching an insurance penetration rate comparable to that of Western countries will always be very difficult.
Speaking at the Quo Vadis 2023! conference on 'Life Insurance: Stimulus for Economy, Support for Consumers in Times of Crisis', an event organized by the Foundation of the Financial Studies Institute and DC Media Group, Cosea said: "Romanians have a different economic behavior, and excluding economic behavior from growth models or economic equations is a mistake. Many, very many development elements, of economic rigor, have no chance in Romania, while adaptation, finding immediate means and possibilities of getting out of a situation is characteristic of Romanian behavior. We are highly capable of finding, sometimes brilliantly, immediate solutions. We are incapable of having a strategy for our future. We think more about our career, we think more about how much money to have and spend, we think more about automobiles than about the fact that we could disappear in an instant as a result of an accident or disease. And this wouldn't be the worst thing, because individuals do disappear. The problem is what they leave behind: hardships, family, children and so on."
According to him, Romania is divided into two categories: a few cities with above European levels of income and way of life and the rest of the country, sometimes on the edge of the beginning of the 19th century from an economic point of view.
"With such a state of affairs, requiring the rural population to take out insurance is very difficult," Cosea underscored.
Speaking of economic education, which should start from the lowest grades, Cosea remarked that it is almost non-existent.
"I tell you as a professor, as an author of textbooks, as the author of the first economics textbook put out after the Revolution together with a group of professor friends from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The state of economic education in Romanian schools is very sad, not only that it doesn't develop, but it is falling back. We have manuals, I don't know if they are used or not, but I saw some in which economic education is based on how to use ATMs to withdraw money," he said.
Regarding the insurance industry, Cosea said that in Romania auto insurance is the dominant type, and the effect is the loss of the population's trust. AGERPRES
