Determinants of the productive efficiency for the bank systems in the European Union countries

In the framework of the European Union, one of the economic sectors of most interest to politicians, academics and professionals has been the banking sector. The aim of this paper is to verify the existence of differences in the efficiency of the banking sectors and what variables determine these differences in European Union countries in the period 1988 to 1999. In spite of the role of the European Market as an element of homogenisation, the starting point of the banking sector in each country is noticeably different. In this paper we will compare the banking systems, looking at aggregate data for each country, since both the characteristics of the financial systems and the regulatory activity follow national guidelines. The efficiency values of each banking system calculated by the means of stochastic frontiers in the European Union will then be used as the dependent variable in the estimation of a regression.