Shokhrukh Sherkulov

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Insurance markets in post-Soviet transition economies remain under-researched because most evidence comes from the OECD, the EU, or broad international panels. This paper examines the association between GDP growth, inflation, the central bank policy rate, GDP per capita, and insurance premium growth in a five-country sample comprising Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan from 2014 to 2025. Using 60 country-year observations, we estimate pooled OLS, country fixed-effects, two-way fixed-effects, and one-year-lag models, complemented by HC1 standard errors and exact few-cluster wild-bootstrap inference. GDP growth is positively associated with nominal premium growth in pooled and country fixed-effects models, with coefficients of 1.41 and 1.48. The exact wild-cluster p-value is 0.063 in both cases. The coefficient becomes –0.64 after adding year effects and –0.08 when regressors are lagged by one year. The evidence therefore supports a contemporaneous and specification-dependent association rather than a stable predictive or causal relationship. Inflation and policy-rate results are also sensitive to specification and few-cluster inference. A CPI-deflated premium check produces the same pattern. The study provides comparative evidence from five transition economies and shows why common shocks, nominal measurement, data harmonization, and limited cluster counts matter for inference in small cross-country panels with substantial macroeconomic and institutional heterogeneity.