保險公司之國際競爭力比較

Abstract

Internationalization and liberalization of insurance market is one of the most important reforms in financial policies for the next decade. The increased competition in the insurance market from domestic financial institutions as well as international investors has forced the insurance companies to operate more competitively. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of Taiwanese insurance companies to determine whether they are able to compete in the international market. This paper takes the U.S. and Japan insurance industries, which are the leading players in the world insurance market, as the benchmarks to see the differences in operation performance between Taiwanese and the international insurers. The empirical data applied in this paper include most companies in the insurance industries of the three countries for the years of 1992 to 1997. The research methodology includes the cluster analysis and regression analysis of the selected performance measurements. The results of cluster analysis show that overall the performances of Taiwanese insurers are in a reasonable range for both life and property-liability insurance industries. Taiwanese life insurance companies have the good performance on loss ratio and investment yield. In the property-liability insurance, Taiwan has the lowest expense ratio among the three countries. Given the comparisons, it is expected that the Taiwanese insurers have the potential to compete in the international market in terms of operation efficiency although the total amounts of insurance sales in Taiwan are still small now, especially the property-liability insurance.