Abstract
For decades policymakers in the EU and the SEMC have implemented regulatory reforms to foster integration and promote competition, efficiency, and productivity in the financial industry. We assessed the impact of these reforms – via the estimation of stochastic meta-frontiers – and convergence for the EU and the SEMC over the period 1997–2010. We found efficiency improvements and convergence in Northern Europe and the CEE but not in the EU-MED and the SEMC. The Northern and Eastern parts of the EU are more homogenous in their movement towards a common technology, although differences among them remain. The reform experience of the SEMC has been less successful than that of other developing and transition countries, particularly the CEE.
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Notes
- 1.
The small sample size in some cases made it necessary to group some countries together. This was done for Cyprus and Malta; Algeria and Libya; Syria and Jordan; Latvia and Estonia.
- 2.
This is possibly the less meaningful of the comparisons, given the fragility of the SEMC sample, the difference in sample sizes and the possibly very different banking systems.
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Casu, B., Ferrari, A. (2015). Dynamics of Bank Efficiency in the EU and SEMC: Is There a Convergence?. In: Ayadi, R., Dabrowski, M., De Wulf, L. (eds) Economic and Social Development of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11122-3_12
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