بانک ها در مجموع عوامل تغییر بهره وری در اقتصاد در حال توسعه: آیا مالکیت و ریشه مهم است؟

This paper employs the Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) method to analyze the productivity of the Malaysian banking sector during the period 1995–2004. The empirical findings indicate that the Malaysian banking sector has exhibited productivity regress due to technological regress rather than efficiency decline. We find that the foreign banks have exhibited productivity regress, while their domestic peers have exhibited a marginal productivity increase. During the period under study, productivity levels seems to be positively associated with the stock exchange listed banks, but is negatively related to foreign ownership. In essence, the findings provide support to the home field advantage and the “limited form” of the global advantage hypotheses. On the other hand, the empirical findings seem to reject the ‘liability of unfamiliarness’ hypothesis.

Does ownership matter? And how does it affect banking firms’ performance? Banking firms have heterogeneous ownership, corporate, market, and risk characteristics (Isik & Hassan, 2003). While the choice of ownership: foreign, local, public, private, state, etc. is important in the context of non-bank firms, it becomes crucial in the context of a bank (Boubakri, Cosset, Fischer, & Guedhami, 2005) and is an essential element for the development of a healthy banking system in developing countries (Lang & So, 2002). By applying frontier efficiency techniques, a growing number of studies have examined the relationship between bank ownership structure and differences in frontier efficiency.1 However, most of the available studies on the ownership-performance relationship have concentrated mainly on the U.S. or other developed countries (Pi and Timme, 1993, Berger and Mester, 1997 and Lang and So, 2002). Evidence from developed countries is not transferable to developing countries, which often lack a well-defined market for corporate control and possess weak property rights (De, 2003). Furthermore, evidence from the U.S. may not be comprehensive due to the lack of state owned banks in the country (Altunbas et al., 2001).

This paper examines the comparative performance of foreign and domestic banks in Malaysia during the period 1995–2004. By using the non-parametric Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) approach, the productivity estimates of individual banks are evaluated. To further complement the results of the productivity measures derived from the MPI, we have analyzed the determinants of the foreign and domestic banks’ productivity using various accounting measures of bank performance. The preceding empirical analysis allows us to shed some light on the relationship between bank ownership, characteristics, and performance.