An Efficiency Comparison of European Banking Systems Operating under Different Environmental Conditions

The paper investigates the operating efficiency differences of a sample of commercial banks across 10 European countries. First, the paper analyzes the technical efficiency of each country sample following the “basic” Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model incorporating only banking variables. Then, a “complete” DEA model is introduced, incorporating environmental factors together with the banking variables of the basic model. The comparison between the two models shows that country-specific environmental conditions exercise a strong influence over the behavior of each country's banking industry. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002