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Bringing Private Insurance Back In. The “Geneva Association” and the Rise of Elite Business Policy Groups in the post-Keynesian Decades (1970-2000)
| This contribution explores the functioning and activities of the International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics. Since the early 1970s, this club of insurance executives, better known as the “Geneva Association”, has developed extensive research on risk economics, insurance theory, and the changing relations between the state and private actors in social provision. This elite business group has also played a key role in shaping of a common voice for the private insurance sector during crucial reorientation decades characterized by economic crisis, the deregulation of financial and service markets and the neoliberal offensive against the postwar welfare states. This contribution analyses the transnational members’ network and intellectual production of the Geneva Association as well as its policy influence. Focusing on the example of old age provision, this contribution will show how the Geneva Association has relentlessly criticized pay-as-you-go social insurance while advocating both the adoption of funded pensions, a key market for private insurers, and the rise of the retirement age, another tenet of neoliberal pension reform. This contribution will also compare the Geneva Association with other elite forums, such as the “Group of Thirty” organized by leading banking and financial executives, in order to develop a clearer picture of the ways and means multinational business interest coordinate their action in the post-Keynesian age.
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