China's life insurance companies have adopted asset-liability matching, but as a result find themselves short of instruments to invest in that reflect the long-term nature of their obligations.
Our problem is lack of supply in the bond market, says Raymond Tam, a member of Taiping Life Insurance's investment committee in Shanghai.
The situation is less acute for Taiping, which is a newer company and did not write policies with guaranteed payouts reflecting the high interest rates of the early 1990s. It is also small, with only Rmb16 billion $2 billion of assets under management, compared with $45 billion at market giant China Life Insurance, or the $22...
