The purpose of this paper is to provide for both life and non life insurance a measure-ment of economies of scale and an assessment of productive performance of French com-panies. We use a translog cost function to check the presence of scale economies and a parametric approach to construct our yardstick of productive efficiency. Our panel data covers 84 life and 243 non life companies for the period 1984-89. The main findings indicate both the existence of increasing returns to scale and a wide dispersion in the rates of in-efficiency across companies. Those two results are shown to be closely linked to a number of characteristics of the companies studied, particularly their institutional form. 1.

The purpose of the paper is to measure technical efficiency levels in 15 OECD insur-ance industries over the period 1983-1991 and to decompose productivity changes into tech-nical progress and efficiency variations. We show that the growth in the productivity obser-ved in all countries is essentially imputable to improvements in technical progress. We then try to see whether some structural national characteristics of insurance markets can partly explain the differentials in efficiency levels across countries. Reinsurance rates and market shares in OECD both seem to favor efficiency levels. The study is a step towards a compre-hensive efficiency comparative study of the OECD insurance markets especially desirable in this period of increasing integration and deregulation of the market. 1.