保险类外文翻译--人寿保险是否有利于退休金计划

Is Life Insurance Good for Retirement Planning?

At first glance, the life insurance industry appears to be in trouble as it faces the millennium.

As the large baby boomer market ages, these consumers have shifted their financial focus

away from life insurance and towards assuring their future comfort.Although the industry has

long recognized that its future lies in more in financial products than in life insurance, it has

lately been losing its share of the retirement market.

Between 1992 and 1994 alone, insurers' share of 401(k) plans slipped from 34% to

30%,while mutual funds' share leaped from 26% to 37%. Tax-deferred annuities sold by

insurance companies fell in share of Americans' total retirement assets to 16.61% in 1996

from its peak in 1990 of 22.56%. In individual retirement accounts, while banks' market

share fell dramatically from 61% in 1985 to 18.4% in 1996, insurance companies saw mutual

funds and brokerage houses gain the fattest slices of the banks' loss.

Such developments can, however, be misleading. Two experts who believe that the life

insurance industry's picture is far brighter than it first appears are Paul Hoffman and Anthony

M. Santomero of the Wharton School's Financial Institutions Center. Their paper, "Life

Insurance Firms in the Retirement Market: Is the News All Bad?" answers their own titular

question with a decided "no." Hoffman and Santomero point to a number of facts that, while

not completely reassuring to the industry, definitely show some profitable opportunities. A

revised version of this paper appeared in the Journal of the American Society of CLU and

ChFC.

First of all, retirement planning is a huge and growing market. Contrary to reports that have

appeared in the past, baby boomers are saving more rapidly than their parents. And, face it,

they have to: The decline of defined benefit plans, which Americans once counted on so

heavily for their golden years, demands that they look to other financial instruments to

protect their futures. That opens up new sales opportunities for group and individual

retirement plans sold by financial companies, including insurers. And annuities, which are

insurers' biggest retirement-oriented product, are growing in importance as a share of

Americans' wealth. Moreover, annuities have remained stable as a percentage of retirement

assets.

Second, while mutual funds and brokerage houses have been expanding their market share,

their inroads have been mostly at the expense of depository institutions, not life insurance

companies.

Third, the retirement market is a growing financial feast, even if insurers do have to compete

a little harder for their share of the bounty. By the end of 1996, total private retirement assets

in the U.S. stood at almost $5.1 trillion, having increased as a share of total national wealth

from 10.6% in 1983 to 13.6%.

There has also been a decided shift in the nature of the nation's retirement assets. In 1980,

total defined benefit assets in the U.S. were 2.5 times defined contribution assets (mostly,

401(k) plans). By 1993, the latest date for which figures are available, total funds of both

types of plans were almost equal. From 1984 to 1993, total U.S. 401(k) assets alone grew

from about $92 billion to $616 billion, increasing from 0.74% of Americans' total wealth to

2.18%. As a share of total retirement capital, 401(k)s rose from about 7% in

1984 to 16.6% in 1993, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Individual retirement accounts, although no longer as attractive as a saving vehicle due to the

loss of most tax advantages in 1986, still capture a huge amount of total retirement assets. By

the end of 1996, savings in IRAs had swollen to $1.35 trillion, representing around 3% of

U.S. wealth. Most of the growth was from gains in the equity market rather than in new

contributions. Meanwhile, mutual funds and brokerage firms picked up more than 43% of the

depository institutions' drop in IRA market share, increasing their own share from 15.8% to

37.9% for mutual funds and 14.7% to 35.8% in the case of brokerages. Insurers' share of the

IRA market actually fell from 10.4% in 1990 to 7.8% in 1996.

The annuity market represent insurers' best hopes to retain a significant share of the

retirement market. In 1993, annuities represented almost 20% of the market, following IRAs'

23.4%. Insurance companies' share of this huge financial stash stood at almost 76% in 1993,

equal to more than $1 trillion, of which about $734 billion was earmarked for retirement.

(These figures only include tax-advantaged annuities).

Life insurance carriers, then, are likely to retain significant sales and profit growth in the