Institutional coverage As a consequence of the implementation of the new OECD Global Insurance Statistics' framework, there is a break in series between 2008 and 2009 regarding life and non-life business data where composite insurance undertakings exist. Up until 2008, the insurance business is broken down between life and non-life business. As of 2009, the insurance business is broken down between the business of pure life, pure non-life and composite undertakings and composite undertakings' business is further broken down between life and non-life business. Some countries do not allow for insurance undertakings to be active in both life and non-life insurance business and therefore composite insurance undertakings do not exist in these countries. In other countries (e.g., Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain) however, the share of employment in composite insurance undertakings accounts for more than half of the whole domestic insurance sector. Therefore, to have comparable data across years for life business data (resp. non-life), one has to sum up the life (resp. non-life) business of pure life (resp. non-life) undertakings and the life (resp. non-life) business of composite undertakings as of 2009.
In 2016, a new supervisory framework for insurance and reinsurance companies was implemented in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). This framework includes harmonised reporting requirements across EU/EEA countries. These requirements led to changes in national data collection, which may hamper the data comparability with the ones collected before 2016 for some countries which only collect data with the Solvency II framework.