Taiwan's Insurance Bureau has published a list of worldwide indexes that local insurance companies can use when investing in foreign exchange-traded funds.

The list includes 15 equities, fixed-income and commodity indexes, calculated by Citi, Lehman Brothers (now Barclays Capital-branded indexes), Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, S&P, Dow Jones Indexes, NASDAQ and MSCI.

Earlier in the year, the regulator approved foreign ETF investment for insurers, and the more recent announcement is intended to facilitate the nascent market for ETFs. The indexes chosen represent insurance industry feedback and consideration of the index brand and history. Taiwan may add to the list of approved indexes for ETFs as the market develops and insurers begin to invest.

The effort will not only lead to a wider range of transparent and efficient investments for insurers' accounts in a wide range of asset classes, it is also hoped that the presence of these foreign ETFs will increase exposure for the local ETF market as well.

The approval limits ETF investments to those that are index-linked. Also, there are no single-market, sector-based or strategy-embedded indexes, such as FTSE's fundamental indexes. These indexes in particular are popular among Asian institutions. Another interesting absence from the list is the FTSE/Xinhua A50 Index, a popular index basis for ETFs listed in Hong Kong and Asia.

The complete list of acceptable ETFs covers ETFs pegged to the:

Citigroup World Government Bond Index
Citigroup World Broad Investment Grade Index
Lehman Brothers Global Aggregate Index
Merrill Lynch US High Yield Master II Index
Merrill Lynch Global High Yield Index
JPMorgan Global Government Bond Index
JPMorgan Emerging Markets Bond Index Global
S&P 500 Index
Dow Jones Industrial Averages Index
Nasdaq Composite Index
MSCI Emerging Market Index
MSCI Asia ex-Japan Index
MSCI Latin America Index
MSCI Eastern Europe Index
Dow Jones AIG Commodity Index