Banking efficiency in Egypt: an application of data envelopment

The objective of this study is to investigate the efficiency of Egyptian banking. Employing data envelopment analysis (DEA), this study is the first to measure the efficiency of banks in Egypt. We compare the efficiency of large, medium and small banks and the efficiency of foreign and domestic banks using a balanced panel which cover 14 banks operating in Egypt from 1997 to 2013. For a comprehensive analysis, technical efficiency is decomposed into pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency. In all panel data models, we find that medium banks are the best performers while large sized banks are the least efficient compared with other categories. The results show that foreign banks have revealed better performance than domestic banks operating in Egypt.