Insurance — quarterly series Algeria (2010-2021)

The Algerian insurance market, quarter by quarter, 2010 to 2021. 2,021 observations: premiums written and claims paid, by line of business, by scope, and — the rare dimension — by company ownership.

Six non-life and life lines: motor, fire and miscellaneous risks, transport, agricultural, credit-surety, and on the life side accident, health, assistance, life and death, capitalisation, group protection. Each split across public, private and mixed companies, with their total.

That split is what makes the file worth having: it says who holds the market. In 2015, public companies write 87.9 billion dinars of non-life premiums out of 118.1 for the whole market; in 2018, 92.0 out of 126.0. Close to three quarters, and the share moves slowly.

Two periodicities, separated and labelled. Tables headed "T4 2010" give the single quarter's flow; those headed "2016 / 12 / 31" give the cumulative total since January. On one page, claims paid run 9.7, then 20.7, 34.1 and 43.8 million — which only makes sense cumulated. Serving both in one column would read as a fourth-quarter explosion where there is only accumulation. The periodicity therefore ships with every value, in plain words.

The identities the table prints, verified row by row. Non-life lines sum to non-life insurance; that plus life insurance gives the direct market; the direct market plus international acceptances gives the total. Each identity rests on different rows from the last, and a block where none is checkable does not ship. 164 blocks out of 217 pass.

A cross-check we had not programmed. The three ownership categories — public, private, mixed — sum exactly to the total, although that check was not built into the extraction. And market premiums come out at 152.3 billion dinars in 2019, the known size of the Algerian market, with the 2020 dip at 144.7.

What the layout demanded. The columns run in reverse order — Q4 on the left at x=191, Q1 on the right at x=422. Reading left to right would shift every value by three quarters, and no total would notice: column sums would stay correct, only the dates would be wrong. That is the kind of error you find only by comparing against another source, once it is already late.

A page also carries four sub-tables per year, same lines and same "market total", separated only by a bold line with no values. Confusing them could have passed public-company premiums off as the whole market's.

What we do not publish, and why. Fifty-three blocks are refused, mostly because the printed totals do not add up: page 88 of the 2021 edition prints 3,829,469 where its own lines sum to 38,290,438 — a digit missing in the source. We do not correct published values; we refuse the block and say so. 2011 and 2016 therefore have no quarterly market total, and 2010 and 2021 are incomplete.

Unit and source. Thousands of current dinars, as published. 1,044 observations are confirmed by two distinct bulletins. The 2015 to 2020 bulletins carry no insurance section at all — a property of the publication, not of the reading.