Probabilistic assessment of earthquake insurance rates for buildings - Seismic Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure Systems - page 800

the establishment of TCIP, it is still not as high as desired and needs to be
improved substantially. The main factors which cause the penetration to
remain below the desired levels are identifi ed as follows (Yucemen, 2011):

• A fatalistic mentality in society and the habit of expecting the State to

provide everything.

• A low level of income and the wrong impression that the earthquake

insurance premium is expensive.

• The cultural awareness of insurance has not reached to a suffi cient level

in Turkey and obtaining insurance is not a high priority in daily lives of
people. Parallel to this, awareness of the public about TCIP and com-
pulsory earthquake insurance is not very high.

• Lack of trust in TCIP with respect to the compensation of losses after

an earthquake.

• There are no legal penalties or fi nes for the enforcement of the 'com-

pulsory' earthquake insurance.

• Governments follow a populist trend by displaying their willingness to

provide post-disaster aid to homeowners by themselves. This destroys
the homeowners' incentive to participate in the program. Instead, the
State may subsidize the earthquake insurance premium for the low-
income section of the population, which will be a rational policy.

29.4.6 Future actions
TCIP has proved to be a well-designed public-private partnership due to
its satisfactory performance over the past 12 years. A number of initiatives
are still being undertaken to improve the system in various aspects. The
major initiative is to develop strategies to increase the take-up rate. For this
purpose, new public relations strategies and advertising campaigns are
developed in order to enhance the risk awareness of the public and over-
come the adverse effects which hinder the increase in penetration and
renewal rates.
A number of mechanisms are attempted to enforce the earthquake insur-
ance. For several years homeowners needed to present their insurance
policy to the Land Registry Offi ce whenever they have to carry out an
operation concerning the building. A similar plan of obliging homeowners
to present their insurance policy when opening an account for services, such
as water, natural gas, electricity, and telecommunications was recently put
into practice for creating additional checkpoints. This type of checkpoint
also improves the risk awareness of individuals.
Besides these initiatives, two major policies are under consideration for
future realization:

• Allocation of a modest portion of the annual income of the pool to
mitigation investments. Examples of these are: risk avoidance and