عملکرد سیستم بانکی یونانی از نظر EMU: نتایج حاصل از یک روش غیر پارامتری

This paper estimates economic efficiency, TFP change, and technical change of the Greek banking system over the period 1993–1998. The beginning of the examination period coincides with the acceleration of liberalization and deregulation of the Greek financial system, in view of the country joining the EMU. The study uses Data Envelopment Analysis to measure technical and allocative efficiency. Also, productivity change is computed using the Malmquist Total Factor Productivity approach and is composed of technical and efficiency changes. The results show that the majority of the Greek banks operate close to best market practices, while allocative inefficiency costs seem to be more important than technical inefficiency costs. Also, the positive but not substantial TFP change of the Greek banking system is associated to efficiency improvement for the medium-sized banks and to technical change improvement for larger institutions.

By the mid-1980s, the need for a flexible and market-oriented financial system and the prospects for participating in the Single European Market initiated efforts towards the deregulation of the Greek banking system. Over the 1990s, banking activity in Greece was decisively affected by the harmonization of national regulations within the European Union and especially with the enactment of the Second Banking Directive. Also, consistent macroeconomic and structural policies were adopted in view of the country joining the Economic and Monetary Union, which gradually reduced inflation and interest rates.1 Currently, the Greek banking system is faced with increased competition, internationalization and disintermediation. These factors, together with the fast development of information technology, have triggered major structural changes in the Greek banking system, which is making efforts at increasing efficiency, reducing bank service costs and diversifying in other business areas. Further changes are expected in the future. In recent years only two published papers have focused attention on the rate of productivity growth, and cost efficiency on the Greek banking industry (Karafolas and Mantakas, 1996 and Noulas, 1997). However, both studies limit their analysis to the pre-1993 period when the liberalization of the financial system was actually initiated. No information is so far available on productivity and the cost structure of the Greek banking sector over the deregulation period. The purpose of this paper is to study productivity and cost characteristics of the banking system of Greece, a medium-sized country, during the liberalization and deregulation period. Up to the present the Greek banking system has not been studied adequately due to data deficiencies and its features have not been thoroughly analyzed.2 We believe that the assessment and quantification of performance, such as cost efficiency and productivity growth of the Greek banking system over the liberalization period is necessary for an evaluation of its performance and future prospects within the EMU framework.3 The conclusions drawn could prove useful for the analysis of the banking sectors in other medium-sized economies that are undergoing structural changes. From a methodological point of view the estimation techniques adopted to obtain economic efficiency at firm level follow two basic approaches: the stochastic frontier approach and the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. Within the stochastic frontier approach, a wide variety of alternatives have been proposed (see the review of Berger and Humphrey, 1997). The evaluation of the merits and the limits of the two approaches justify our choice of adopting the non-parametric approach to measure efficiency in the banking sector. More specifically, in the econometric approach we must make assumptions about the functional form, and a disturbance term must be included in the estimation procedure. The non-parametric DEA approach does not depend on adopting a specific functional form, and does not make distributional assumptions, at the cost of ignoring noise. The present paper uses linear programming techniques (DEA) to provide quantitative information in three related fields. First, to provide estimates of technical efficiency for Greek banks. Technical efficiency is the ability of banks to utilize their resources efficiently and use the least amount of inputs corresponding to a given set of output levels. Second, to measure allocative efficiency of Greek banks. Allocative efficiency results from employing inputs in wrong (non-optimum) proportions and indicates how much the actual cost deviates from the minimum cost. Third, to measure total factor productivity in Greek banking and decompose intertemporal changes into technical progress and efficiency change. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Recent developments in the Greek banking system are contained in Section 2. Methodology and computational techniques are presented in Section 3. The data description is presented in Section 4. The empirical results are presented and discussed in Section 5. The final section concludes the paper.

In this study we analyzed the cost efficiency and productivity features of the Greek banking system over the period 1993–1998, a period which is characterized by an acceleration of liberalization and deregulation of the entire financial system. We used Data Envelopment Analysis to investigate the technological characteristics of the sector. Our empirical results showed that the majority of Greek banks operate at high overall efficiency levels of over 95%, while larger institutions seem to be more efficient compared to smaller banks. On the other hand, all types of banks are allocative inefficient to the same extent and that allocative inefficiency costs are more important than technical inefficiency costs for the Greek banking sector. High scores of allocative inefficiency may be explained by lack of effective competition in the Greek commercial banking sector. In this context, the intensification of cross-country competition from the rapidly changing international environment will exercise pressures on bank profitability forcing banks to improve in efficiency even further. Using a Malmquist productivity index approach, a positive but not substantial technical efficiency change has been documented over the liberalization period (approx. 2.3% on average). Our results indicate that most of the increase in technical efficiency comes mainly from medium-sized banks. Also, TFP changes are mainly attributed to technical change improvement of larger banks. Therefore, we may conclude that the improvement of performance of the Greek banking system is mainly attributed to technical change related to larger banks while in medium sized banks the TFP improvement is attributed to technical efficiency increase. This fact can be explained by the ability of the larger institutions to adopt innovative technologies. Smaller institutions are oriented towards an efficient exploitation of the market potential. Finally, over 1993–1998, our results indicate an increase in overall efficiency of the banking system save for 1996 when a substantial drop is observed as a result of a decrease in profitability of the banking system in accounting terms. Thus the actual performance of the banking sector towards the end of the 1990s is comparable to what it was at the beginning of the decade. Over the second half of the 1990s, Greek banks started to reconsider their strategies and extensive restructuring in terms of mergers and acquisitions took place, in view of Greece entering the Euro-zone. These changes are related to a wave of privatization initiated by direct government action, in line with EU agreements. Also, they are attributed to market discipline, i.e. to obtain productivity and efficiency gains. However, since these changes took place mostly towards the end of the 1990s the expected productivity improvement will come off in the future. In the years to come it is excepted a new round of mergers, acquisitions, conglomeration and strategic alliances in the Greek banking market. Greek banks will be aiming at repositioning in the EU markets and achieve the necessary critical mass for large-scale operations, also enabling them to absorb high information technology costs. Smaller Greek banks will be aiming at the exploitation of market segments by providing differentiated services to local or regional clients, but they will be less able to achieve a more efficient use of resources owing to their small size.