Wulf Henning Roth – European Competition Policy for the Insurance Market
The legal environment of the European Insurance Market has undergone a radical change in the last 10 years: National regulations on insurance supervision have been deregulated in order to open the national, traditionally
intensively regulated insurance markets for community-wide competition. In a more or less parallel action, the Commission discovered its competence to enforce the EC competition rules in the insurance sector. In the early
1990's, the Commission issued a Block Exemption Regulation concerning co-operation within the insurance sector with respect to certain agreements. This development has come as a surprise for some analysts: The endeavour of the Commission to deregulate the national insurance markets had been conceived as being based on the general philosophy that state regulation of the insurance business, especially in the field of premiums and policy conditions, is undesirable from a competition perspective.