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Introduction: Blockchain is gaining attention in various industries and sectors. It is described as an emergent technology with immense possibilities similar to how the internet has revolutionised how businesses are currently carried out. Still, various sectors have either not adopted or are in a very nascent stage to adopt blockchain technology in their operations. The current research examines how blockchain can be used in the insurance sector. This industry was chosen as it is extremely relevant in today’s world and directly bears its economy.

Purpose: To determine the current and future path in which the insurance industry is moving about blockchain technology adoption and find synergy between blockchain technology and the insurance business.

Need for study: The insurance industry is highly relevant in today’s world and directly bears the country’s economy. Additionally, blockchain is an emergent technology with immense possibilities similar to how the internet has revolutionised how businesses are done. The current research looks at how blockchain can be used in the insurance business.

Methodology: A systematic literature review was conducted in this study by reviewing literature related to blockchain technology and the insurance sector. Science direct was used as a source of information. For this study, the literature review approach was chosen since it allows us to trace the growth of the subject matter and identify the patterns that have formed through time.

Findings: The study found that the insurance sector has recognised the latent benefits of blockchain technology and has begun to develop its usage in selected cases such as fraud prevention and risk assessment.

Practical implications: The current study can be referred to by academicians, marketers, industry people, and policymakers. The study encourages companies and academicians to further investigate the usage of blockchain in insurance.

This study aims to examine the research output on climate change, environmental risks and insurance from 1986 to 2020, thereby revealing the development of the literature through collaborative networks. The relationship between insurance, climate change and environmental threats has gained research attention. This study describes the interaction between insurance, climate change and environmental risk.

This study is a bibliometric analysis of the literature and assessed the current state of science. A total of 97 academic papers from top-level journals listed in the Scopus database are shortlisted.

The understanding of climate change, environmental risks and insurance is shaped and enhanced through the collaborative network maps of researchers. Their reach expands across different networks, core themes and streams, as these topics develop.

Data for this study were generated from English-written journal articles listed in the Scopus database only; subsequently, this study was representative of high-quality papers published in the areas of climate change, environmental risks and insurance.

The results of this study can be useful to academic researchers to aid their understanding of climate change, environmental risks and insurance research development, to identify the current context and to develop a future research agenda.

The findings of this study can improve the understanding of industry practitioners about climate change and global warming challenges, and how insurance can be used as a tool to address such challenges.

This study is a novel attempt. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to better understand climate change, environmental risks and insurance as a research topic by examining its evolution in an academic context through visualization, coupling and bibliometric analysis. This bibliometric study is unique in reviewing climate change literature and providing a future research agenda. Using bibliometric data, this study addressed the technical aspects and the value it adds to actual practice. Bibliometric indicators quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate emerging disciplinary progress in this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficiency analysis of the Indian general insurance sector using data envelopment analysis (DEA) and subsequently assess the impact (if any) of the global slowdown on the performance of the allied sector.

The paper aims to analyze the operating performance of 12 general insurance companies in India between 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 using DEA based on secondary data collected from Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority Annual Reports.

Findings clearly indicate that the global economic slowdown has severely affected the performance of the private sector companies; while the public sector companies exhibited relatively lesser variation in performance levels.

The methodology employed in the study estimates relative efficiencies without assuming any functional form; as a result the proper comparison of input utilized with the output produced is not possible. Several other tools like Malmquist Index and two-stage procedure have not been used.

The study brings into light the operating characteristics and efficiencies of the Indian general insurance sector during the global slowdown and therefore holds practical value for policy makers and practitioners as well as for the decision makers of the firms employed in the study.

In the USA, private insurance companies serve as an integral part of the delivery and risk sharing of the federal crop insurance program. Governed by the Standard Reinsurance Agreement (SRA), private crop insurance companies must designate an eligible crop insurance contract to the assigned risk, developmental, or commercial funds. While the SRA restricts the private sector delivery system in a number of ways, the assignment of contracts to crop insurance funds, however, is left solely to the discretion of individual crop insurance companies. Thus, as to the companies' profitability viewpoint, the optimal selection of the crop insurance funds is the most important task. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a decision framework for crop insurance companies to make optimal decisions regarding the purchases of crop reinsurance. This information and framework may also be useful for crop insurance firms in China when considering crop reinsurance decisions.

The paper studied three commonly used parametric loss distributions and presented a general guideline to choose the most profitable fund within the company's risk bearing level.

The paper finds many important features in the commonly used loss distributions, which are useful to maximize the company's underwriting returns.

The paper provides a general decision framework for optimally ceding risks to reinsurance. While this paper focused on agricultural insurance decisions by firms, the concept could be applied to general reinsurance decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of insurance companies in Ghana using a two‐stage procedure to ascertain whether insurance companies are cost efficient and also to examine the efficiency determinants of insurance companies.

Using a cross‐sectional data set of 30 firms over the period 2006‐2008, the study evaluates the efficiency scores by applying a data envelopment analysis that allows the inclusion of multiple inputs and outputs in the production frontier. The study also employs a regression model to identify the key determinants of efficiency of the Ghanaian insurance industry.

The empirical results in the first stage suggest higher average efficiency scores for life insurance business than non‐life insurance companies. In the second stage, the authors observe that the drive for market share, firm size and the ratio of equity to total invested assets are important determinants of an insurance firm's efficiency.

The findings of this study provide insights into the cost efficiency of insurance companies in Ghana. This has implications for the efficient management of insurance firms in the country.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a set of policy suggestions for integrating risk management and increasing risk reduction measures and planning.

It bases on a brief description of the disaster risk management programs in Mexico, a review of their recent available assessments as well as it makes a brief economic analysis of their performance to conclude with some policy suggestions.

Despite its novel design, the still low penetration of governmental instruments for disaster risk reduction in Mexico has led to high society’s reliance on post-disaster measures. It has encouraged moral risk among potential victims. Even when crop insurance has increased coverage over the past decade, disaster prevention instruments are still underused. Accessing to prevention funding requires project proposals from national and sub-national governments based on concrete risk assessments. However, the prevailing lack of institutional capacity to elaborate proposals from sub-national governments seems to explain it at a large extent. The paper provides a set of suggestions on this regard.

There is no recent integral assessment of disaster risk in Mexico. Although there is a recent OECD review of the National Civil Protection System, its analysis leaves out the catastrophic agricultural insurance, critical part of comprehensive risk management of a country. On the other hand, there are recent evaluations of programs public for disaster risk management, but these consist of only individual program evaluations, lacking integrative and comparative analysis. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive view of government risk management and concludes with a series of policy recommendations.