Costa Rica

Axco provides details on the life insurance sector including Costa Rican market participants, reinsurance and distribution channels. The reports describe classes of business from both individual and group life such as whole life, endowment, term life and unit-linked.
Information on non-life classes for example critical illness and private medical insurance.

The report describes the public and private healthcare system in Costa Rica, the scope of cover, accessibility financing and provides an analysis of how the public and private systems complement each other.

Axco reports on the three pillars of Costa Rican pension provision.

• State pension benefits including benefit calculations and eligibility criteria 
• Workplace pension provision; types of schemes calculations eligibility and; tax implications
• Voluntary individual pension provision, type of products and tax implications

The Costa Rica report provides an in-depth analysis of the regulatory framework governing social security as well as details on financing and eligibility. Information includes but is not limited to

• state pensions,
• permanent disability benefit
• occupational accident and disease
• maternity and paternity payments 

The Costa Rican insurance market is predominantly non-life although the proportion of life business has shown a general tendency to increase year on year. In 2019 written life, PA and healthcare written premiums totalled CRC 262.90bn (USD 447.64mn), of which life premiums represented 50.77% or CRC 133.48bn (USD 227.27mn), an increase of 7.71% over 2018.

Despite the consistent growth, penetration of life products still remains modest at around 0.37% of GDP and USD 45.03 per capita. This reflects a relatively low demand from local consumers and is unlikely to change significantly in the ....

The pensions market in Costa Rica is a mixed social insurance and individual account system that is mandatory for workers.

The system operates on a multi-pillar basis with the first pillar being a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) scheme. Benefits are considered to be wide-ranging, although not necessarily over-generous.

The second pillar consists of individual savings accounts administered by a private pension fund provider ....

Costa Rica has an effective health service and as the country has no military forces to finance, it is able to invest more money than is usual in Latin America in social security and the provision of healthcare.

The state institution responsible for social protection is the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social - CCSS). Founded in 1942 it manages various social security programmes, including the universal health insurance scheme ....