non-life commercial property/casualty business to self-insurance and other forms of alternative risk transfer (ART) in recent years.

That is one of the conclusions to be drawn from a new set of statistics on the ART market drawn up by local insurance boss Mr. Jonathan Crawley, with the help of Tillinghast.

As the diagrams on this page show, Mr. Crawley, president of Sphere Drake Underwriting Management (Bermuda), estimates that the global property/casualty premiums for 1992 came to $347 billion.

Of that amount, 75 percent ($260 billion) was placed in the conventional marketplace, 18.7 percent ($65 billion) was accounted for by self-insurance (i.e. no insurance), and 6.3 percent ($22 billion) went on other alternative risk transfer, in which Bermuda is the world's leader.

The swing away from the conventional marketplace among US corporations is even bigger, the figures show.

In 1992, only 62.9 percent ($105 billion) of US premiums were placed in the conventional market, 27.5 percent ($46 billion) went on self-insurance and 9.6 percent ($16 billion) went on ART.

The global ART market, excluding self-insurance, generated $22 billion of premiums in 1992, according to Mr. Crawley's statistics.

Of that amount, 63.6 percent ($14 billion) went to captives and risk retention groups, 20.5 percent ($4.5 billion) went on financial insurance, 6.8 percent ($1.8 billion) went on speciality insurance, another 6.8 percent went on Government pools and the remaining $0.5 billion went to rent-a-captives.

In the captive scene, Bermuda is still way out on its own as the world's leading player, accounting for 41.1 percent ($6 billion) of the $14 billion premiums generated in 1992.

On-shore US captives accounted for 16.1 percent ($2.25 billion), Cayman, Luxembourg and the Isle of Man accounted for 8.9 percent ($1.25 billion) each, Guernsey grabbed 7.1 percent ($1 billion), while the rest of the premiums went to Dublin, Barbados and Singapore.

In his speech which closed last week's Bermuda Insurance Symposium, Mr.

Crawley told delegates, including many people from overseas, that the world's ART scene was "a picture dominated by Bermuda''.

"All of the specialty insurance companies are here, 95 percent of the rent-a-captives are here and virtually all of the financial writers are here,'' he said. "Only the government pools are not here.

"And within that captive global $14 billion lies the backbone of the Bermuda insurance industry, which has 1,350 of the world's captives.'' Mr. Crawley said that Bermuda's captive managers had "spearheaded the thrust which has brought Bermuda to the prominent position which it holds as an insurance centre today''.