| From different perspectives or measured in different methods, Chinese Life industry developed very quickly in recent years. We care both the speed and the quality of development, and the drivers, and how those drivers affect development. Therefore, factor productivity is very important to the whole life industry and to the individual insurers with different shareholders backgrounds, of different business types, and in different stage of development.Total factor productivity is a theory explaining the contribution to growth of different factors; it is widely applied to analyze economic growth and industry growth, while it is rarely used in financial industry because of measurement problems. This dissertation measures output based on value-added method, and employs Stochastic Frontiers Analysis (SFA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-Malmquist index as quantity analysis tools.From normative perspective, total factor productivity growth reflects technology change and technical efficiency progress, the drivers of technology changes are organization innovation, production innovation and production specialization.Technical efficiency progress comes from introduction and development of core business system, centralization of IT system, development of infrastructure network.From the empirical study, this dissertation found, except for extreme years, Chinese life industry experienced sustained total factor productivity growth, and local life insurers contributed most to the growth. Foreign life insurers, pensions companies and health insurance companies did not show significant TFPG. In terms of the decompositions of TFPG, technology change, economies of scale and pure technology efficiency did not change in the same direction, technology change and pure technology efficiency fluctuated heavily, and technology change is especially important for TFPG. By comparison between different types of players, foreign life insurers, pension companies and health insurance companies did not show significant technology change and technology efficiency progress, the reason is that those two types of insurers are at starting stage and still within the production frontier, productivity grows in a relatively slow pace. Another point is that the whole life insurance industry shows very weak economies of scale.Based on the results of normative and positive study, this paper concludes development is still the first priority for the whole life insurance industry, improving productivity during the process of development is the realistic choice. From the macro perspective, the importance of development is not only for the industry itself, but for the whole society and economy. Accordingly, the government may support the life insurance industry by reducing tax burden; from micro perspective, life insurer can improve the business structure and change the product portfolios to enhance the productivity growth. In the long run, customer education is good for higher insurance penetrations and thus the development of the industry; in the middle term, well-developed market structure and adequate market competitions are helpful for life insurers to improve their capabilities; in the short term, a more opened market will introduce highly competitive and productive players to come in and will be healthy for the whole industry. From the technical perspective, more input of capital and human resources will have imminent effects on the growth of the industry, which is still in the starting stage. However, sustainable growth of total factor productivity will highly depend on the innovation of the industry, including products innovation, service innovation and the extension or expansion of the industry chain.This dissertation consists of eight parts, including the introduction and other seven chapters. The main contents are as follow:The introduction mainly introduces the research backgrounds of this dissertation, research topics, and definitions of main terms, research methodology and theoretical tools, and the whole framework of the dissertation.Chapter one is the theoretical backgrounds of total factor productivity (TFP) and TFP growth, it traces the origin of its theoretical bases. TFP and TFPG are the products of neo-classical theory, while other economic growth theories are helpful to understand TFP and TFPG.Chapter two is literature review. It introduces how the TFP theory comes out and its development, and its implications into different research areas, especially into the research of life insurance industry, all of these implications are very helpful for the dissertation.Chapter three is the research methodology, including the measurement of TFP and TFPG, the definition of inputs and outputs, index method. This chapter also introduces the quantitative analysis tools employed in this dissertation, including stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA), this chapter is the basis of the empirical study.Chapter four analyzes the development of Chinese life insurance industry, including the change of inputs and outputs, and the partial factor productivity growth.Chapter five is the normative analysis of TFP of Chinese life insurance industry, it reveals organization innovation, production innovation and specialization are the driving sources of TFPG of Chinese life insurances industry.Chapter six is empirical study, it analyzs the results of TFP and TFPG of Chinese life insurance industry, and decomposes TFPG into technology change, economies of scale and technical efficiency progress. Based on this result, this chapter concludes how TFP and TFPG changed across the industry in recent ten years.Chapter seven is the policy suggestions. Based on the positive study and empirical analysis, this dissertation gives out detailed suggestions from macro and micro perspective, and measures from long term to short term to enhance the TFP growth of Chinese life insurance industry.This dissertation has followed innovations:Firstly, it is the first time that TFP theory was introduced to research the development of Chinese life insurance industry. It reveals how the productivity changed and the driving forces and quantified how different components contributed the growth of the industry.Secondly, this dissertation researches TFPG of different insurers both on group bases and on individual bases. The research samples cover almost all of the existing insurers of the whole industry, which makes the conclusions of the research more persuasive and representative and avoids technical aviation or errors resulting from inadequacy of numbers of samples.Thirdly, based on precedent researches, this dissertation absorbed many highlights and good points and made many improvements on them. For example, both SFA and DEA-Malmquist are employed in this dissertation, which avoided errors and aviations resulted from methodology.And fourthly, this dissertation made practical suggestions for the development of Chinese life insurance industry. All of these suggestions are tightly connected to the improvement of TFPG, which are helpful both for the whole industry and good for individual insurer.This dissertation has following deficiencies:Firstly, because of the difficulties of data collections, some inputs variables are not so accurate, otherwise, the result might be more persuasive and practical. And for the same reason, some data is not of good quality and has to be replaced by others, which might undermine the empirical study and its conclusions.Secondly, the noises aroused from the change of financial reporting standards are not excluded for technical reasons. In and after2008, new financial reporting standard were introduce into Chinese insurance industry, which significantly affects the measurement of premium income, reserves and investment income, though some of the affections can be traded-off each other. Public financial data did not disclose how individual company dealt with this factor, and thus the data of different insures are not completely comparable, which also might affect empirical study and its conclusions. |
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