Abstract
Insurance sector in India undergo many changes after the introduction of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.Several new players enter in to the market. Opening up of the insurance industry to private players create high competition and efficiency challenges to the existing players in the market. Liberalisation brings many drastic changes in this sector. Here the investigator tries to compare the efficiency of public sector general insurance companies in the pre and post liberalisation period. In the post liberalisation period, due to increased competition, 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. The present study evaluates the efficiency parameters of four public sector general insurance companies in the pre and post liberalisation period. For the evaluating the efficiency of the public sector general insurance companies in India, secondary data are collected from four public sector general insurance companies. To assess the financial performance of the general insurance companies, a comparative performance of efficiency of public sector general insurance companies during the pre and post liberalization period has been worked out. Then the efficiency parameters are compared and analysed. 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 using Mann-Whitney U Test. The results shows that even after the introduction of liberalisation in the general insurance sector, the four public sector companies performed well in the case of technical efficiency and pure technical efficiency. But the companies fails to maintain scale efficiency during the post liberalisation period.
Keywords:-Efficiency, General Insurance, Technical Efficiency, Scale Efficiency
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