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Evaluating the Double Bottom-Line of Social Banking in an Emerging Country: How Efficient are Public Banks in Supporting Priority and Non-priority Sectors in India?

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Abstract

India is the emerging country with the world’s greatest social banking program, so Indian banks are required to finance the weaker sectors of society that are excluded from the traditional financial system (priority sectors), while also providing mainstream banking services to non-priority sectors. For social banks to promote the ethical–social management of their dual mission and to be successful in today’s business environment, they must be as efficient as possible in both dimensions of their banking activity. Whereas the efficiency of Indian banks in the financial dimension is well understood, to date there has been no research evaluating their double bottom-line of achieving social and financial goals. Our study applies an innovative Network Slack-Based DEA model to evaluate how efficient Indian public banks are when providing credit to priority and non-priority sectors. We also explore the main factors influencing bank efficiency. Results suggest that Indian public banks have performed relatively well in both activities, although social efficiency has been slightly greater than financial efficiency. Moreover, their commitment to priority sector lending has not come into conflict with the profit-seeking objectives of mainstream banking services. As regards determinants of social and financial efficiency, there are countervailing forces played by regional wealth, bank size, branch networks, and rural location. Our findings are therefore useful for stakeholders of Indian public banks as they indicate if these entities have adequately managed their double bottom-line, and hence if they are critical for poverty alleviation and development in India.

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Source Compiled by authors with data from RBI (2012–2015)

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Notes

  1. The study by Huang et al. (2014) proposes a new NSBM model with undesirable outputs and super efficiency (US-NSBM) to measure bank efficiency. We only consider the NSBM with undesirable outputs (U-NSBM) because super efficiency is outside of the goals of our research.

  2. Several previous studies have shown that non-performing loans (or NPLs) need to be considered as the main undesirable output of banks (Fukuyama and Weber 2010; Fujii et al. 2014; Lozano 2016; Fukuyama and Matousek 2017). An NPL is a loan that is in default or close to being in default. In India, the RBI states that an asset is considered as “non-performing” when interest and/or installment of principal has remained “past due” or unpaid for more than 90 days.

  3. We use Spearman´s Rho correlation coefficients rather than Pearson correlation coefficients because the latter are subject to biases if all variables are not normally distributed, which is the case in our study.

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Acknowledgements

A part of the research for this paper was completed while Mahinda Wijesiri was a visiting scholar at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), India. He gratefully acknowledges the funding and support from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada. The authors would like to thank the Section Editor and the anonymous referees for their useful comments. Any remaining errors are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Funding

This research was funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada (Grant No.: IDRC 107125; Recipient: Mahinda Wijesiri).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of León, Campus de Vegazana, s/n, 24071, León, Spain

    Almudena Martínez-Campillo

  2. School of Business Administration, Université du Québec – TÉLUQ, 5800, Rue Saint-Denis, Montréal, QC, H2S 3L5, Canada

    Mahinda Wijesiri

  3. COPPEAD Graduate Business School, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rua Pascoal Lemme, 355 - Cidade Universitária, Rio de Janeiro, 21941-918, Brazil

    Peter Wanke

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  1. Almudena Martínez-Campillo
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Correspondence to Almudena Martínez-Campillo.

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Almudena Martínez-Campillo declares that she has no conflict of interest. Mahinda Wijesiri has received a research grant from the “International Development Research Center (IDRC),” Canada. Peter Wanke declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Research Involving Human Participants or Animals

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Martínez-Campillo, A., Wijesiri, M. & Wanke, P. Evaluating the Double Bottom-Line of Social Banking in an Emerging Country: How Efficient are Public Banks in Supporting Priority and Non-priority Sectors in India?. J Bus Ethics 162, 399–420 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3974-3

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