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The insurance scenario in general and the life insurance in particular has undergone a massive change after liberalization with the entry of private sector insurers. Naturally, an interest has been created to know how the insurers are faring in the post-liberalized environment, particularly the erst-while monopoly public sector company. The study focuses on the financial performance analysis of the insurers in India. The analysis is based on (i) financial parameters under the CARAMELS framework, and(ii) Data Envelopment Analysis (two input-two output model)followed by Spearman´s rank correlation and t-Test.The results of the analyses show that the sole public sector behemoth,namely LIC, outperformed all the private insurers. The correlation study between the ranks obtained from the two analyses points to a significantly high level of relationship. A trend analysis is also made on important revenue and cost variables of public and private insurers. Application of mean difference test on those variables points to a significant difference between the two sectors. We hope that the book will be immensely useful to policy makers, insurers,regulators, researchers, and students.

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Dr. Sinha, a rank holder and a keen researcher, is an Assistant Professor in Commerce at Vidyasagar University, India. He did his Ph.D from University of Kalyani, India, supervised by Professor Sunil Kr. Gandhi. Presently he is working on a UGC-Sponsored Research Project. Dr. Sinha is joint-editor of a book on Financial Inclusion and Microfinance.

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