Ownership Structure and Bank Efficiency in Six Asian Countries

This paper focuses on efficiency measures of banks from six countries in Southeast and East Asia. We use a two-stage approach to study the post-crisis period 1999-2004. We first estimate technical efficiencies using Data Envelopment Analysis and test for cross-country differences. Efficiency scores are relatively high for South Korea and relatively low for the Philippines. We then investigate the link between ownership structure and efficiency controlling for various factors such as size, risk and the economic environment. We find that efficiency scores are higher for banks which are held by minority private shareholders and banks that are foreign-owned.