Towards measuring allocative efficiency in selected industries of India

This paper examines trends in allocative efficiency over the period 1960–1961 to 1986–1987 in seven Indian industries, namely refining and manufacture of sugar; petroleum refining; manufacture of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides locomotives and parts, locomotives, and cotton textiles. We discover that allocative inefficiency has been non zero in each industry for every year. Allocative inefficiency has not declined over time in those industries where prices are administered, whereas in industries where prices are not administered it has. Industries that are predominantly in the public sector are not necessarily characterized by greater allocative inefficiency than those that are predominantly in the private sector.     

Banking efficiency and its determinants in selected frontier african markets

The degree of banking efficiency is of key importance as this has significant implication on the stability of financial systems and ultimately impacts on an economy. In this paper, we extend the existing literature by measuring the degree of bank efficiency in ten frontier African countries. We also attempt to analyse the determinants of banking efficiency in the sample countries. We employ a bank-level panel data set over the period 2008–2012 to measure banking efficiency in a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, we use the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to estimate technical, pure technical and scale bank efficiency. In the second stage, we use Simar and Wilson (J Econom 136:31–64, 2007) truncated bootstrapping approach to analyse the determinants of banking efficiency. The results of our analysis show that, to a greater extent, banks in the countries studied have efficient banking sectors. The results of truncated regression indicate that bank size is negatively related to banking sector efficiency while the degree of risk is positively related bank efficiency. Overall, the present study provides empirical information that may be used to guide future financial reform policies in the Frontier African countries.     

Market structure, performance, and efficiency of the Chinese banking sector

The Chinese banking system is evolving from a mono-bank system to one involving many banks of varied types and functions and there is a heated debate on whether competition can help to improve the performance and efficiency of the banks. This paper tests five hypotheses that have been proposed in the literature on the relationship between market structure, profitability, and efficiency using data envelopment analysis with a panel data of the 14 largest nationwide banks in China during the period of 1998–2007. The empirical results show clearly that neither the structure-conduct performance nor the efficient structure hypotheses hold in China. The strongest support is for the relative market power hypothesis that suggests that banks with differentiated services and products are those with higher market shares, and that they are able exercise their market power to obtain higher profits by setting higher prices. Technical efficiency has a significant effect upon bank profitability and the policy makers should promote further competition in the Chinese banking sector.     

Estimation of output loss from allocative inefficiency: A comparison of the Soviet Union and the U.S.

This paper presents two different estimates of the output loss resulting from allocative inefficiency in the Soviet Union and the United States. Surprisingly, the evidence from our examination of nine industrial sectors during the period 1960–1984 shows only small differences in measured allocative inefficiency between the United States and Soviet economies. Instead of immediately rejecting this result as the product of unreliable data and insurmountable methodological difficulties, we present a plausible explanation for the unexpectedly strong performance of Soviet-type economies in the allocation of labor and capital across sectors. If true, the finding of relatively low levels of resource misallocation implies that the source of poor economic performance in Soviet-type economies must be due to technical inefficiency, slow technological change, and/or production of the wrong mix of outputs.     

Efficiency in Banking: Empirical Evidence from the Czech Republic

The paper examines the cost efficiency of the Czech-banking system in the 1990s by applying the distribution free approach model. Reported results indicate that foreign banks were on average more efficient than the other banks, although their efficiency was comparable with the ‘good’ small banks’ efficiency in early years of their operation. Based on the estimated results it is argued that early privatisation of state-owned commercial banks and more liberal policy towards foreign banks in the early stage of transition would have enhanced the efficiency in the banking system.     

Ownership structure, regulation and the market for corporate control in the EU banking sector

This paper analyzes the efficiency of shareholder control and hostile takeovers as corporate governance mechanisms in the EU banking sector against the background of the existing corporate governance regulations and different ownership structures of banks in the EU. The results indicate the there is trade-off in EU corporate governance regulation between better investor protection and a higher efficiency of the market for corporate control. The main problem is differences in the ownership structure of banks in the EU banking sector. This implies that EU corporate governance regulations should be customized to the specific ownership structure of banks and not toward harmonising national regulations.     

The efficacy of the Egyptian bank reform plan in mitigating the impact of the global financial crisis

This study tests the ability of the Egyptian Bank Reform Plan (2004–2009) to enhance bank efficiency and attain the prime national macroeconomic objectives of generating youth employment, stabilizing consumer prices and managing national debt, which were significantly impacted by the global financial crisis (GFC). The Pedroni Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) method is employed and the period covered extends from 2003:01 till 2010:03. The results of the study reveal that the bank reform program has helped the economy weather the impact of the global economic meltdown. On the whole, the reformed banking sector showed evident success in helping the Central Bank of Egypt achieve its nominal anchor of price stability, with the highest outcome delivered by foreign banks. State banks are the most efficient in creating jobs and financing national debt. Private domestic banks are fairly functional in job creation and financing foreign debt. While these results attest to the general success of the reform in mitigating the impact of the blow of the GFC, further enhancement of the role of foreign banks is needed to attain the other two macroeconomic goals.     

Umbilical cord blood banking: beyond the public-private divide

Umbilical cord blood is a source of haematopoietic progenitor cells, which are used to treat a range of malignant, genetic, metabolic and immune disorders. Until recently, cord blood was either collected through donations to publicly funded cord blood banks for use in allogeneic transplantation, or stored in commercial cord blood banks for use in autologous transplantation. The line between public and private cord blood banking is being blurred by the emergence of "hybrid" models that combine aspects of both the public and private systems. The authors describe these hybrid models and argue that their emergence is explained by both market forces and public sector policy They propose that the future of the sector will depend heavily on several key developments that will differentially affect public, private and hybrid banking models.     

我国银行行政接管的法律诠释与制度完善

银行的业务模式具有天然的脆弱性和不稳定性。当一家银行发生严重危机时,考虑到银行服务的广泛性及特殊性,银行监管机构通常会对其实行行政接管,采取各项救助手段使其恢复正常经营,避免其走向行政关闭或司法破产的末路。目前,我国银行行政接管法律制度对于接管条件、救助手段、接管程序、接管权力等方面的规定均存在不足。结合我国银行业发展的现状,建议出台针对银行行政接管的专门规章,在银行行政接管的实施过程中,各政府部门应协调同步,司法部门应予以必要协助。     

Banking in the cloud: Part 1 – banks' use of cloud services

This paper looks at EU banks' use of public cloud computing services. It is based primarily on anonymised interviews with banks, cloud providers, advisers, and financial services regulators. The findings are presented in three parts. Part 1 explores the extent to which banks operating in the EU, including global banks, use public cloud computing services. It describes how banks are using cloud computing and the key drivers for doing so (such as time to market), as well as real and perceived barriers (such as misconceptions about cloud and financial services regulation), including cultural and technical/commercial aspects. It summarises how banks have approached the cloud and how cloud providers have approached the banking sector.Part 2 of this paper will cover the main legal and regulatory issues that may affect banks' use of cloud services, including how the regulation of outsourcing applies to banks' use of cloud services. Part 3 will look at the key contractual issues that arise between banks and cloud service providers, including data protection requirements, termination, service changes, and liability.All three parts of the paper can be accessed via Computer Law and Security Review's page on ScienceDirect at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02673649?sdc=2. The full list of sources is available via the same link and will be printed alongside the third part of the paper.     

Consolidation and Competition in Emerging Market: An Empirical Test for Malaysian Banking Industry

This paper investigates the effect of bank consolidation on market structure and competition in Malaysian banking industry during the years of 1998–2005. The study evaluates the degree of competition using H-statistic proposed by Panzar and Rosse (1987 Testing for monopoly equilibrium. J Ind Econ 35:443–456). The estimated H-statistics are positive ranging from 0.53 to 0.81 and the Wald test for the market structure for monopoly or perfect competition is rejected. The results imply that the financial institutions in Malaysia earned their revenue in the condition of monopolistic competition with the traditional interest-based market is significantly less competitive than the overall market. The evidence is however insufficient to show that there is an increase in competition due to a change in the market structure. Thus, the findings suggest that additional competition policy is needed to ensure competition in the Malaysian banking market in view of further consolidation in the banking sector.     

Soft budgets and hard rents: a note on Kornai and Gomulka

This note shows how Kornai's concept of the soft budget constraint can be decomposed into separate elements of technical inefficiency and relative price distortion. The distinction between r-budget softness and m-budget softness introduced by Gomulka is shown to correspond to the equivalent and compensating variation measures of efficiency loss. It is also argued that budget softness should be viewed as the outcome of a rent-seeking process in which a firm's action in the control sphere incurs an opportunity cost in the real sphere. Adopting such a perspective leads to a re-definition of the resource loss associated with budget softness and results in much higher estimates of the social costs of soft budgets than those proposed in the existing literature.     

Russian 1998–2007 TFP decomposed: some inspiration emerging from inherited Soviet legacy

Using a recently developed stochastic Translog production function frontier model, technical inefficiency, technological progress and returns to scale are examined during Russia’s 1998–2007 cyclical expansion at the branch level including both the market and non-market economy. The service sector plus high skill-intensive goods production is shown to be relatively more efficient than traditional Soviet era goods sectors. Technical efficiency decreases markedly over the expansion while technological progress is quite high (23 %) suggesting an expanding frontier leaving many branches behind as the economy adjusts away from the early transition era. Much greater attention to human capital policies are suggested to foster intensive growth in an environment of low oil and gas prices.     

商业银行专利保护现状分析与策略研究

中国加入WTO以后,国内的商业银行面临着外资银行的强烈冲击及挑战,外资银行意图利用专利策略在我国银行业面前竖起一道“专利壁垒”。由于体制和观念上的原因,我国银行业一直以来并不重视金融产品的专利保护,致使金融产品数量少、质量低,且整个行业金融产品专利保护的意识淡薄。对此,国内银行业应该以积极的态度采取各种适当的方法来保护自身的知识产权。     

Health care policy issues in the drug abuser treatment field

As we enter the 1990s drug abuse has once again become a major health concern, and for the first time the drug treatment field has had to address many of the policy, regulation, and planning issues resulting from cost inflation that have become commonplace in other parts of the health care field. To avoid serious errors and confusion, drug abuse health policies must recognize the very different needs of the public and private sectors. The public sector, where poor addicts receive drug treatment provided or purchased by the government, has long suffered from chronically inadequate funding. Although responses to several epidemics (heroin, crack, and AIDS) have produced periods of increased allocations for drug abuse treatment, more often than not long waiting lists at programs have rationed treatment to lower-income addicts seeking care. Low salary levels have limited the quality of public treatment services, and the absence of resources has hindered the development of programs that respond to new technical developments and drug abuse problems, such as the crack epidemic. Despite severe resource shortages, the public drug treatment system has sometimes used resources inefficiently, with little attention to appropriateness of admissions, lengths of stay, ambulatory treatment modalities, or varying levels of care. Public sector goals for the 1990s should include filling current shortages in drug treatment services, developing adequate long-term funding for treating addicts who lack third-party coverage, modernizing the treatment system, developing new patterns of practice that use existing resources more efficiently, and developing a plan for treating intravenous drug users infected with the AIDS virus. In the private sector, the advent of working- and middle-class demand for drug treatment in the 1970s and 1980s has produced a new drug treatment system that suffers from many of the policy problems common to the rest of health care. Drug abuse in the workplace has resulted in much wider coverage of substance abuse services by insurance companies and HMOs. The availability of third-party funds has spawned a for-profit chemical dependency treatment industry. The high cost of private residential treatment services has caused significant cost inflation. Cost-containment measures, which are a new phenomenon for this field and are inappropriate for the public sector, have led to the same confusion and debates that they have produced in other areas of health care.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

论银行业监管的基本理念

银行业监管的理念是银行业监管的科学根据和精神支柱。银行业具有巨大的外部性,主要体现为银行业所具有的系统性风险,银行作为国家货币政策传送带和作为支付清算体系支撑者所具有的负面外溢效果。防范和化解这类风险和效果非监管莫能奏效。同时,银行业还存在严重的信息不对称性,需要借助监管保护金融服务的消费者。此外,银行本身经营中所具有的高杠杆性与期限失配的资产负债结构也使得监管更加必要和正当。以此来审视我国监管的理论研究和实践,我们亟须在深化监管理念认识的基础上进行改进和完善。     

债权实现中的利益平衡——以汶川震后银行贷款处理为中心

汶川地震使得银行的巨额债权难以实现,舆论认为应当进行债务豁免,商业银行则更希望其债权能得到保护,冲突解决的关键在于如何平衡债权人的合法权利与债务人的生存权,但现行法律及司法解释对此的规定或者不够精细,或者其风险分配值得商榷。债权人与债务人的风险分担应该满足公平原则与效率原则,其核心就是使个体所承担的风险最小化。短期看,可以通过比较债务豁免、债务延期、强制执行等策略的优劣来选择最为实用的措施,政府应当明确其能与不能的边界;长期看,需要个人破产、巨灾保险等制度的建立与完善。     

The Causal Relationship between Stock,Credit Market and Economic Development: An Empirical Evidence for Greece

This paper examines empirically the causal relationship among financial development, credit market and economic growth by using a trivariate autoregressive VAR model in Greece for the examined period 1988:1–2002:12. The results of cointegration analysis suggested that there is one cointegrated vector among the functions of stock market, the banking sector development and economic growth. Granger causality tests have shown that there is a bilateral causal relationship between banking sector development and economic growth and a unidirectional causality between economic growth and stock market development whereas there is no causal relationship between the stock market and banking sector development.     

The redenomination risk of exiting the Eurozone: An estimation based on the Greek case

Changing a country's currency involves a redenomination risk arising due to assets and liabilities that are impossible to redenominate because of contracts governed by foreign law. Depreciation or appreciation of the new currency could, therefore, result in losses or gains, thus creating a risk for economic agents. The risk can be estimated by splitting the economy into public, private, banking and central banking sectors, and summing up exposed aggregate assets and liabilities. This method is applied to Greece showing that exiting the EMU would certainly entail forbidding redenomination losses for the Greek public sector, leading to default. Surprisingly, however, the impact on the private and the banking sectors would actually be positive (gain). The impact on the Bank of Greece would be ambiguous depending primarily on the legal status of TARGET2 liabilities. It is notable that even the Bank of Greece possesses a significant cushion in the form of bonds under foreign law. In all, the redenomination risk for the Greek economy is modest, with the exception of the public sector.     

Women, urban governance and the public service ethos

This article considers gender and the public sector, examining the degree to which women make a ‘difference’ to public service. In reporting on a research project into the 30% seat reservation or quota system for local female politicians in the Indian Mega-City of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), consideration is given to the ways in which women and men manage and organise their daily lives and contribute to public governance, with particular attention given to the cultural specificities of the Indian context in the period of post-colonial rule. It is argued that women politicians and officers are held in high regard as valued and respected holders of public office, that their values and attitudes are more closely aligned to a public service ethos than men's and that their role in the processes of change affecting India at the present time may prove to be significant. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.