Innovations in microinsurance research (original) (raw)

In considering the focus of the special issues on this theme, the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board allowed the Guest Editor(s) freedom of choice. They gracefully refrained from taking a position on whether microinsurance required a separate theoretical framing or whether it should be analysed using classical models (thus suggesting that this is another type of insurance). It is helpful to recall that the term microinsurance was first used in an article published in 1999 (Dror and Jacquier 1999). It is also useful to remind that most of the printed material (this issue included) offers empirical analysis. We scoped the volume of publications on this topic in Google Scholar since 2000 (see Fig. 1). The first decade saw a tenfold increase in the number of publications per year, from about 100 to close to 1000. After that, we witness a continued but lesser growth (the highest number of microinsurance publications per year, 2300, was recorded in 2014). The ResearchGate weekly reports of browses-downloads-citations also suggest an ever-increasing and widespread use of published material. The Web of Science count of microinsurance publications shows two peaks, in 2016 and 2019. These were the years when this journal published special issues on microinsurance. This suggests how significant the contribution of the special issues was to scientific (peer-reviewed) publications on this topic. The more comprehensive treatises on microinsurance were published as books. Also, we recall region-specific scoping studies that have been the source of statistics on enrollments. Over this time, most authors have moved on from the initial preoccupation with definitions. We have one article summarising the developments in this