| The development of insurance industry, as one of the three pillar industries of financial system,has drawn people’s enormous attention. Insurance industry, with its functions of security, financing and social management, plays an irreplaceable role in promoting economic development,thus ensuring the sustainable social reproduction and smooth social operation. Over the past30years since the insurance industry had recovered,particularly over the ten years since its comprehensive opening-up, the insurance industry in China has witnessed a rapid growth with a development rate higher than the world level.Efficiency has all along remained as the core issue of economic studies. When it comes to insurance industry, efficiency refers to the correlation between input and output in business operations, which gives full expression to input-output capacities of the insurance industry, resources allocation ability, market competiveness and sustainability. The efficiency of insurance industry is an issue of constant concern to both the theoretical communities as well as to the insurance supervision authorities and the practitioners. In the tens years of the overall opening up of insurance industry, the foreign-funded corporation went all out to seize the share of the Chinese market, thus giving rise to the turbulence of the competitive environment. Amongst the worsening competition in global insurance industry and the development of China-funded insurance corporations, it is of practical significance to boost the sustainable development of insurance industry in China by conducting research on the efficiency of both foreign-funded and China-funded insurance corporations over the past decade, analyzing the influence of the introduction of foreign capitals on insurance industries’ efficiency and proposing effective ways to improve the efficiency.By adopting the mathematical optimization theory and econometric model as well as the theories pertaining to the changes of opening-up efficiency of insurance industry, this paper mainly investigates the insurance corporations that conducted business in China from1998to2010, researches the efficiency of the insurance industry and explores the influence of the introduction of foreign capitals on the insurance industry in China by means of empirical analysis. This paper is consisted of six chapters with the structure listed as follows:the first chapter mainly gives a brief introduction to the research background and significance, research methods, the current research status at home and abroad as well as the research thoughts. The second chapter expounds on the efficiency theory as well as its assessment method, including the evolution process of western efficiency theories, the definition of efficiency and the ways to assess the efficiency of insurance industry. The third chapter offers a general outlook of China’s current status as well as the current situation of foreign capital in China. By means of DEA method, the fourth chapter measures the technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency, allocation efficiency and cost efficiency of both domestic and foreign insurance corporations in China and analyzes the results by taking staff numbers, operating expenses and paid-in capitals as the input variable and insurance payment and the change in reserves as the output variables. The fifth chapter calculates the technical efficiency of domestic and foreign-funded insurance corporations in China by means of crossover DEA model, introduces the rankings of the corporation efficiency and analyzes the trend of the efficiency of the two samples and the development and variations of different insurance corporations over the past13years so as to make a comparison between the traditional DEA model and the crossover DEA model. On the basis of the aforesaid analysis results, the sixth chapter draws the conclusions and put forward the proposals. This paper finds out that:(1) the efficiency of domestic life insurance corporations is higher than that of foreign-funded corporations;(2) the efficiency of domestic life insurance corporations is declining; however, foreign-funded life insurance corporations develop in a relatively slow manner with low efficiency;(3) the introduction of foreign capitals may exert a certain degree of bearings on the efficiency of domestic life insurance corporations. Before China’s entry into WTO, most of China’s corporations are proven efficient; however, the situation reversed since2000;(4) the introduction of foreign capitals is advantageous to the development of life insurance corporations in China.The innovation of this paper could be found in the following aspects:(1) with an extensive sample range, the efficiency variation of sample life insurance corporations could be more correctly observed. However, the sample range in the previous empirical studies spanned from3to5years. This paper bridges this gap by researching the life insurance industry as a whole in a longer sample period, which extends for13years from1998to2010;(2) in addition to the technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency, this paper also measures and calculates the efficiency of allocation and cost and analyzes the efficiency of domestic and foreign life insurance corporation from the perspective of cost and allocation;(3) it introduces the crossover DEA method to calculate the efficiency, thus rectifying subjectivity and redundant effective units of traditional DEA method in assessing the decision-making unit. Through the statistical analysis of the efficiency rankings within the life insurance industry, it analyzes the status and the development situations of life insurance industry in Chinese market according to the rankings of the efficiency of foreign-funded life insurance corporations. |
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