Technical and Scale Efficiency of Indonesian Rural Banks

The existence of the rural bank in the Indonesian' financial market is more pronounced recently than ever especially after the Asian crisis in 1997. The ability of rural banks to shield during the crisis and the state programs to develop small and medium enterprises (SMEs), make the role of rural banks more pivotal. Rural banks begin to fill in the gap of financial services in rural areas. Recently, the issue of efficiency has received attention among academic researchers. This study estimates the technical and scale efficiency of rural banks in Indonesia during the period of 2006 and 2007 by using the non-parametric approach – Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The results suggest that the degree of technical efficiency is found to be lower than the degree of scale efficiency which indicates that portion of overall inefficiency is due to producing below the production frontier rather than producing at an inefficient scale. In addition, majority of the banks in the sample exhibit suboptimal scale which imply that output should be expanded to reach the optimal scale