Applying Data Envelopment Analysis, Dea, to Measure the Efficiency of Chinese, Brazilian and Indian General and Life Insurance Companies

In this article, we measure technical, allocative and overall cost efficiency of Chinese, Brazilian and Indian general and life insurance companies by applying Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA. DEA estimates efficiency in firms with multiple inputs and outputs. In our case, we are testing one input and one output. We are testing two samples of 50 life and 50 general insurance companies operating in China, Brazil and India. As an input we use the monthly standard deviations as a measure of risk and as an output we use monthly returns. We try to find which companies lies on the efficient frontier in terms of increasing return to scale, constant return to scale and decreasing return to scale. The dataset are over the period 2000 - 2020. The sample is provided from Thomson Financial Investment View. We find mixed results in terms of increasing return to scale, constant return and decreasing return to scale