NEW BUSINESS AND EFFICIENCY OF INSURANCE COMPANIES IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC

The insurance market in Slovakia belongs to the dynamically developing segments of the financial market. In the European environment, which it is a part of, legislative coherence between national insurance markets is growing and competitiveness is increasing. Mutual interaction and globalization is reflected at the level of national markets. However, last years were marked by large fluctuations in the financial markets and by increasing economic instability, which influenced the development of the insurance market in Slovakia. The changes that the insurance market is undergoing are reflected in the fundamental indicators of the insurance market. The topicality of changes is strongly linked with new business. Premiums of new business represent premiums from new insurance contracts in a particular year and thus capture the current trends in the insurance market. The main intention of this paper is to highlight the development of new business of insurance companies in Slovakia and to characterize trends in new business. This article also assesses the efficiency of insurance companies in Slovakia in terms of new business. Several scientific methods are used in this paper to analyze the development of the insurance market. In addition to the method of time series analysis, the method Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used to analyze the efficiency of commercial insurance companies. DEA is a specialized method focused on the analysis of efficiency of transformation of multiple inputs to multiple outputs. It belongs to non-parametric methods and uses linear programming to construct non-parametric data envelopments. Efficiency is assessed in DEA using the score of efficiency. Data envelopment plays an important role when determining the score of efficiency. The scores of efficiency are expressed relative to the data envelopment. The article builds on previous research in the field of assessing the efficiency of insurance companies by DEA models. Its particularity is evaluating the efficiency of commercial insurance companies in Slovakia on the basis of new business. The article is part of the research project The insurance market and the efficiency of insurance companies 1/0208/14 financed by VEGA of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic.