Institutions rules: The primacy of institutions over geography and integration in economic development

This article has two objectives. The first is the documentation of the relative importance of the largest insurance or reinsurance companies in the world and changes that may have occurred in the past 15 years. The second objective is to identify some of the factors that may explain the increased internationalization and most-favored locations of the world's largest insurance groups in transition and developing economies. The results of this study have important implications. First, they indicate that as expected, location-specific factors such as the size of a market, human capital, and good governance do provide an explication of the internationalization of insurance groups. Second, they also show that other factors, such as cultural distance, regulatory barriers, and competitiveness have a significant impact on the choice of countries.