One market grinds out steady single-digit growth under a central bank's wing; the other rebuilt itself in dollars after a currency collapse. What Jordan and Lebanon reveal about how insurance survives hard macro weather.
Insurance is usually analysed in growth markets. Jordan and Lebanon offer the opposite and more instructive view: what the industry looks like when the macro environment is the main risk. One economy has spent a decade managing scarcity with discipline; the other went through one of the worst financial collapses ever recorded outside wartime. Both still have functioning insurance markets — and how each survived says a lot about what actually keeps this industry alive.
The two survival strategies could not be more different. Jordan's is institutional: fold the sector under a strong central bank and grind forward. Lebanon's is monetary: abandon the collapsed currency and rebuild the market in dollars. Both worked, in their way. Neither came free.
Jordan: supervision as strategy
Jordan's market is modest and unglamorous — total premiums of 603 million dinars, about 851 million dollars, in the first nine months of 2024, up 4.9% year on year — but the institutional story is the interesting part. Since insurance supervision was transferred to the Central Bank of Jordan, the sector has been regulated with the same machinery as banks: licensing discipline, solvency oversight and consumer-protection instructions from an institution with real enforcement capacity.
For a small market squeezed between regional conflict, energy import costs and thin household incomes, that supervisory anchor does something subtle: it keeps the sector consolidating rather than collapsing. Jordan's chronic problem has never been catastrophe — it has been too many small insurers competing on price in motor and medical, eroding the capital base year after year. A central-bank supervisor with bank-grade expectations is slowly forcing the scale question the market avoided for decades.
Growth of five percent against this backdrop is not stagnation; it is roughly nominal-GDP-tracking performance in one of the hardest operating environments in the region, with medical inflation and compulsory motor doing most of the work — the same twin engines as everywhere else in MENA, just smaller.
Lebanon: the dollarised phoenix
Lebanon's insurance sector should not, by any textbook, still exist. The 2019 financial collapse wiped out the currency, froze the banks that held insurers' assets, and destroyed the local-currency value of every long-term policy in force. Life savings products denominated in lira became effectively worthless; the sector's balance sheet was hollowed out alongside the banking system it was invested in.
What happened next is the remarkable part. The market re-priced itself into fresh dollars. By 2024, non-life premium collections reached 1.07 billion dollars, up more than 19% year on year, according to Al Bayan data compiled by Credit Libanais — with medical and motor leading, thirty-nine companies still writing business, and the top ten controlling about 71% of collections. Households that trust no institution with long-term savings still pay cash, in dollars, for the two covers that protect them this year: hospital admission and car repair.
Lebanon's lesson is brutal and clarifying: protection products survive currency collapse; savings products do not. When trust in institutions dies, insurance contracts shorten until they fit inside the trust that remains.
What stress-tested markets teach the growth markets
- Short-tail products are crisis-proof in a way long-tail products are not. Lebanon's medical and motor lines rebuilt in five years; its life savings market may take a generation.
- The supervisor is a balance-sheet item. Jordan's central-bank umbrella is worth premium points of stability that never show up in growth tables.
- Dollarisation is a survival tool with a cost: a market priced in hard currency in a soft-currency economy excludes exactly the households that most need cover.
- Fragmentation is the pre-existing condition that turns macro stress lethal. Both markets entered their hard decades over-supplied with small insurers; both are consolidating under pressure rather than by design.
Figures above come from Central Bank of Jordan data as reported by Middle East Insurance Review and from the Al Bayan survey of the Lebanese market published by Credit Libanais, linked below. Lebanese data deserve an extra caution: in a partially cash-based, dollarised economy, premium statistics capture the formal market and likely understate informal arrangements — the true story is if anything larger than the numbers.