| Since the insurance recovery in 1980, China's insurance industry has been rapidly developing,almost every year's growth rate is far more than the growth rate of GDP in the same period. Is this rapid growth lasted for 30 years conducive to long-term development of China's insurance industry, in other words, is this growth healthy and sustainable? This article studies the long-term and dynamic efficiency, reasons and motivations of the changes of insurance institution and explores the future direction of China's insurance institution from the North's "adaptive efficiency" perspective.In general, we divide Chinese insurance institution changes after 1980's recovery into two stages: First, the financial-based insurance institution under the planned economy system, which is featured as the state-owned insurance property rights have the overwhelmingly dominant status and the financial implementation of heavy tax policy, taking oligopoly as its symbol and the distribution relationship between the insurance and finance is formed that the catastrophe losses will be covered by the finance; Second, monetary-based insurance institution under the socialist market economic system, which is characterized as the pluralism of insurance property rights and the independent taxing of insurance companies, taking the monopolistic competition as its symbol, regarding the underwriting business and investment business as of same importance and the normal revenue distribution relationship between insurance and finance has been formed. During the transition from the financial-based insurance institution to the monetary-based insurance institution, the insurance property rights institution, regulatory institution and the market institution have been changed one by one.This article set these institutions as the dummy variables and the input variables, the insurance penetration and insurance density, which reflects the level of development of the insurance industry, as output variables and uses the CCR model of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to analyze the overall effect of the changes in China's insurance institution. The results show that the reform of China's insurance institution is largely successful with the efficiency of input and output increasing continuously. The efficiency value changes over the years also reveal that the Chinese insurance institution has the characteristics of portability, the feature of phased portability of the insurance institution has brought the volatility of the increasing process of efficiency value.On this basis, the article attempts to evaluate the adaptive efficiency of China's insurance institution changes from the point of view of adaptive efficiency, from both the theoretical and empirical aspects. Although North proposed adaptive efficiency theory, but it's mainly based on the experience and the subjective judgments. So far, the adaptive efficiency has not got an widely accepted objective criteria. Neither North's standard of transaction costs nor Yu-Hai Wang's spot cooperation surplus standards can evaluate fully the adaptive efficiency. So the article summarized four basic characteristics of the institutions with adaptive efficiency should have from the North's articles on the adaptive efficiency: (a) There is no industry barriers of entry to fulfill the full competition; (b) There are sound governance structures in order to facilitate the decentralization of decision-making; (c) The organization has sufficient flexibility to enhance their innovative capacity; (d) There is clear definition of property rights and the State could provide credible commitments to protect property rights. The article evaluates the adaptive efficiency of China's insurance institution from the theoretical aspect and the analysis results show that the current China's insurance institution still has not these four basic characteristics of the adaptive efficiency In the empirical analysis respect, this article follows the broadest definition of adaptive efficiency - the adaptability of the institution refers to the mutual relationships between institutional arrangements and economic conditions - to establish the factor - elastic analysis model to evaluate the adaptability between the insurance industry and the social developments.The results of the empirical analysis show that the development of China's insurance industry lagged far behind economic and social developments and there are serious institutional bottlenecks during the development process in the insurance industry and the insurance institutional change does not have an adaptive efficiency.Since the Chinese insurance institutional change does not have the adaptive efficiency, why dose the Chinese insurance industry sustain a high growth for nearly three decades? The article analyze the changes of Chinese insurance property rights institutions, regulatory institutions and the market institutions by using the basic theory and methods of Game Theory and draws a conclusion that the strong upper structure under the dual economic structure in China led unilaterally the insurance institution reforms according to its changes of effectiveness and leads to the institutional changes. The institutional changes dominated by the upper structure unilaterally is generally considered invalid, as it only represents the will of single interest group, but the Chinese government-led insurance institutional change has brought rapid growth of the insurance industry. This article measures the cooperation surplus during the process of Chinese insurance institutional changes using the method of"Rule of Thirds". The result of the empirical analysis shows that the insurance industry obtained a spot co-operation surplus during the process of institutional changes, which means that all the interest groups of the insurance industry have gained the benefits from the changes led by the government unilaterally and this is the main motivation of the Chinese insurance institutional changes. The reason for this result, the article attributed to that the Chinese government has encompassing and practical characteristics of pragmatism. In other words, in the past three decades the Chinese government's interests and the interests of various interest groups basically coincide, and the government constantly adjusts its ideology according to the economic and social environment changes, fulfilling top-down reforms to promote the developments of economy and society.But during the next three decades or longer time, with the forming and continuous dividing of the various interest groups, this fully government-led and mandatory institutional changes is unsustainable.From the analysis of the changing reasons and the adaptive efficiency of Chinese insurance institutional changes, we can see that the insurance institutional reform led by the government unilaterally under the dual structure of the Chinese economy is the most important reason for the missing of the adaptive efficiency. On the base of taking examples of the successful experience of the western developed countries'insurance institutions and their changes, the paper made some recommendations: strengthening the role of the insurance industry association, implementing economic democracy, nurturing small and medium insurance companies and promoting the progressive reforms, etc. To strengthen the role of the insurance industry association aims of establishing a coordinating force in the middle structure, coordinating the conflicts and the interests between the upper and lower structures. The purpose of the implementation of economic democracy is to limit the too concentrated power of the upper structure through decentralization, democracy and the rule of law avoiding the unilateral reforms. Nurturing small and medium insurance companies to enrich the lower structure, so that it has more bargaining power, which can affect the changes of Chinese insurance system. Small-amplitude and multiple stages of gradual reforming is designed to avoid the path dependence of the government-led institutional changes through innovation, pilot testing, etc. |
