Market Concentration and Efficiency of Indian Commercial Banks

Abstract

Abstract:The Indian banking industry is going through a period of intense change, where liberalized business environment has affected the banking business by way of increasing competition, rising customer expectations, shrinking spreads and increasing disintermediation. Ongoing changes in the structure of Indian banking are clearly visible. This paper investigates the levels and determinants of efficiency of schedule commercial banks of this vital sector of the Indian economy by using firmlevel data. For this purpose, a two stage data envelopment analysis has been used. In the first stage, super technical efficiency analysis of 89 sample firms has been undertaken. This study specifies two outputs: total loans and other earning assets and three inputs: labour, fixed capital and total customers and short term funding and the prices are personnel expenses to average number of personnel for labour, total capital expenses to total fixed assets for fixed capital and interest expenses to average total customers and short term funding for the years 1980-81 to 2012-13. In the second stage, the efficiency scores obtained from the first stage are regressed on external environmental factors like fiscal deficits, private investment and the share of foreign banks using a censored regression model, viz. Tobit model. In this context, the term environment is used to describe factors that could influence the efficiency of a firm, where such factors are not traditional inputs and are not under the control of management (17). The results confirm that the varying market condition and the presence of foreign banks will contribute positively to economic growth.