Risk premiums in life insurance

In the current conditions of the Ukrainian economy, which is characterized by crisis phenomena and frequent changes in legislation, the insurance organizations are facing a number of difficulties in maintaining their financial sustainability. Moreover, these processes take place under the increased requirements for solvency of insurers. However, a significant part of domestic insurance companies is financially unstable, which is conditioned not only by the lack of funds, but also by the low level of management. This situation hinders the further development of the insurance market in Ukraine and has a negative impact on all areas of the domestic financial system and prevents it from successful integration into the European financial field. In order to address this problem, it is necessary to distinguish the key groups of risks that affect the financial sustainability of insurance organizations, among which there are the following: insurance, strategic, market risk, risk of inefficient capital structure, risk of limiting the insurance company’s liquidity, tax risk, investment risk, operational risk, the risk of ineffective organizational structure of the enterprise, and information risk. It should be noted that under conditions of changing environment, the impact of these risks only increases, and therefore the task of minimizing the impact of these risks on the activities of insurance companies is highly important. Accordingly, the authors of the article proposed a four-stage strategy to manage the financial sustainability of the insurance company, the purpose of which is to identify the risks of limiting the insurer’s financial sustainability, their qualitative and quantitative assessment, as well as the development and implementation of appropriate measures to minimize and eliminate unacceptable consequences.

Risk management is one of the prominent issues which are pivotal to the success of a business and may adversely affect profitability if not properly practised. Therefore, the main objective of this paper was to determine risk management practices in manufacturing SMEs in Cape Town. The research conducted was quantitative in nature and constituted the collection of data from 74 SME leaders, all of whom had to adhere to a list of strict delineation criteria. All data collected were thoroughly analyzed through means of descriptive statistics. From the findings made, it is clear that SMEs in the manufacturing sector do in fact understand risk management initiatives applicable to ‘manage’ their respective businesses towards sustainability, but not to a large extent. It was found that respondents are unaware of the elements which make risk management effective, which ultimately aids to the development of problems for SMEs. All employees, managers and owners must coordinate their efforts together to identify and manage organizational risks within their ambit to obtain total risk coverage, as well as provide assurance that these risks are effectively managed from a coordinated approach. Further studies may be carried out to identify measures that can be taken to improve the effectiveness of risk management practices in SMEs.

This study applied Altman Z-score model to assess the bankruptcy risk of a set of multidisciplinary enterprises of various types, mainly small and medium enterprises, with data taken from official financial reports of 180 enterprises in Soc Trang province. The binary logistic regression was employed to assess the impact of non-financial and financial factors on the bankruptcy risk of enterprises. The research findings showed that both the non-financial factors such as business area, types and size of the business, the educational level of managers and executors and other characteristics, and the financial factors (indicators) such as earnings before tax, net profit/equity ratio, earnings before interest and tax/total assets ratio, equity/total debt ratio, affect the bankruptcy risk of enterprises. Predicting the bankruptcy risk and measuring its determinants play an important role not only as an effective managing tool of the business, but also as evidence for policymakers to support the sustainable development of business.