Abstract
Indian general insurance sector has undergone major structural changes during the post liberalisation period. Opening up of the insurance industry to private players create high competition and efficiency challenges to the existing public sector companies in the market. The existing four public sector companies face tough competition from newly entered private sector companies. The existing companies are competing with each other and with the private players also. So, they have to improve their efficiency in order to exist in the market. Efficiency refers to the
insurers ability to produce a given set of out puts with the use of inputs. To compare the efficiency of the public and private sector general insurance companies in India, secondary data are collected from 12 out of the 34 general insurance companies (4 from the public-sector and 8 from the private-sector) were selected. The efficiency of the general insurance companies is evaluated company wise using the non-parametric method viz. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Efficiency is evaluated trilaterally- Technical Efficiency, Pure Technical Efficiency and Scale Efficiency. The hypotheses pertaining to efficiency parameters are tested by using Mann-Whitney U Test.
Keywords: - Efficiency, General Insurance, Technical Efficiency, Scale Efficiency
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