Malmquist Index, an Alternative Technique for Measuring Credit Institutions Productivity

The present study tackles the banking system’s productivity in a more complex manner, that integrates multiple input, multiple output variables, abdicating from the reductionist perspective of clasical methods, which imposed limits in the number of variables, in the process of productivity measurement and interpretation. The advantage of Malmquist productivity indexes consists both in a quantitative evaluation of the global productivity of a credit institution over a specified period of time, and in the decomposition of productivity, in order to underline how much of its change is due to the catch-up effect, and, respectively, to the implementation of new technologies. The results obtained revealed that credit institutions placed on the first three places in the banking system, according to assets value, maintained constant their productivity level during the analysed period, meanwhile the other institutions in our sample registered a slowly improvement in productivity, determined, mainly, by technological changes.