Following the publication in the early 1970s of about 40 studies revealing inadequacies in workers’ compensation in the United States, most states passed laws increasing the number of workers covered, raising weekly benefits to equal or exceed 66 2 3 percent of the average weekly wage, and making other improvements. Compensable claims now include those involving back pain, stress, and heart conditions traceable to employment conditions. Many claims also involve court litigation, which greatly magnifies settlement costs. For employers, these and other factors have increased the average cost of benefits from less than 1 percent of wages before 1960 to 2.3 percent in 1992.

The use of credit in modern societies is so various and widespread that many types of insurance have grown up to cover some of the risks involved. Examples of these risks are the risk of bad debts from insolvency, death, and disability; the risk of loss of savings from bank failure; the risk attaching to home-loan debts when installments are not paid for various reasons, resulting in foreclosure with subsequent loss to the creditor; and the risk of loss from export credit because of war, currency restrictions, cancellation of import licenses, or other political causes.

Credit insurance for domestic buyers and sellers is available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and most European countries. It is sold only to manufacturers, wholesalers, and certain service agencies, not to retailers. The insurance is designed to enable the seller to recover a certain percentage of losses from insolvency of the debtor, but the contracts list a number of conditions under which the creditor may initiate a claim regardless of the question of insolvency. The policy is designed primarily to meet the needs of those sellers whose business is concentrated on a few buyers, insolvency of any one of which would seriously jeopardize the financial stability of the seller.

A special form of credit insurance is available to exporters against losses from both commercial and political risks. In the United States, for example, export credit insurance is written through a consortium of insurance companies organized by the Foreign Credit Insurance Association (FCIA). The Export-Import Bank of the United States assumes the ultimate liability for loss, while the FCIA serves as the underwriting agency. Coverage is usually limited to 90 or 95 percent of the account. Prior approval from the FCIA is usually required before export credit insurance is granted. In some cases, the exporter is required to purchase coverage on all credit sales in a given country as a device to reduce adverse selection.

Export credit insurance is used more widely in some countries than in others. In the United Kingdom approximately one-quarter of all export sales are covered, compared with about 6 percent in the United States. Export sales are not eligible for insurance if they are made for cash or financed directly or indirectly through government-guaranteed loans.

Title insurance is a contract guaranteeing the purchaser of real estate against loss from undiscovered defects in the title to property that has been purchased. Such loss may stem from unmarketability of the property because of defective title or from costs incurred to cure defects of the title.

The need for title insurance arises from the fact that real estate transactions are complex and technical. Any legal error, no matter how detailed or minute, may cause a defect in the title that impairs its marketability. Examples of such defects are forgeries, invalid or undiscovered wills, defective probate proceedings, or transfers of property by persons lacking full legal capacity to contract.

Special casualty forms are issued to cover the hazards of sudden explosions from equipment such as steam boilers, compressors, electric motors, flywheels, air tanks, furnaces, and engines. Boiler and machinery insurance has several distinctive features. A substantial portion of the premium collected is used for inspection services rather than loss protection. Second, the boiler policy provides that its coverage will be in excess of any other applicable insurance. In this sense, it may be looked upon as an “umbrella policy” to fill in gaps in the insured’s program. Third, the policy lists the specific losses that will be paid, such as the loss of the boiler or machinery itself due to accident, expediting expenses, property damage liability, bodily injury liability, defense settlement and supplementary payments, business interruption, outage (interruption of service), power interruption, consequential loss due to spoilage of goods, and furnace explosion. The policy will satisfy each of these claims in the order in which they appear, up to the limit of the coverage.

The extensive use of plate glass in modern architecture has produced a special comprehensive insurance that covers not only plate glass but glass signs, motion-picture screens, halftone screens and lenses, glass bricks, glass doors, and so forth. It may be written to cover loss from any source except fire or nuclear radiation.

Increasing international business activity has caused greater use of policies generally termed difference-in-conditions insurance (DIC). The DIC policy insures property and liability losses not covered by basic insurance contracts. It can be written to insure almost any peril, including earthquake and flood, subject to deductibles and stated exclusions. It is often written on an all-risk basis. An international business firm may use the DIC to secure uniform coverage for all countries in which it operates and to obtain higher policy limits than those available from domestic insurers in the various foreign countries.