Bank efficiency and lending propensity: evidence from commercial banks in Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the emerging economies, which has been adopting a bank-based system in the economy. It is very important to investigate the Indonesian commercial banks’ performance given their substantial contribution to the development of the country. This thesis aims to measure and analyse the performance of Indonesian banks in terms of their efficiency and lending propensity over the period 2002-2010. The period testifies the recovery phase after the turmoil caused by the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98 as well as the revocation of the regulation of minimum threshold on commercial banks’ small business loans (finance) in 2001. This thesis employs frontier methods in estimating bank efficiency where both parametric and non-parametric linear programming approaches are used, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). The former is used to estimate the technical efficiencies and the latter is used to estimate the cost efficiencies of Indonesian banks over the period 2002-2010. This thesis also examines the lending propensity of Indonesian banks reflected by the tendency of their total loans and small business loans over the study period. The findings suggest that the technical efficiency of Indonesian banks tends to decrease whilst the opposite tendency is associated with their cost efficiency during the period. The downward trend of their technical efficiency stems from the fact that the period was the post-crisis of 1997-98 where banks were still unsteady to maintain high level of outputs over inputs. While the upward trend of their cost efficiency reflects their intensity to operate more economically in employing their resources during the period. The latter result testifies that Indonesian bank management took lessons learnt from the failure of their previous operations during the crisis. In addition, their total lending propensity is prone to increase over time during the period albeit they have not reached yet the optimum proportions. In contrast, their lending propensity to small businesses witnessed a diminishing pattern over the period. A regulatory change in 2001 seems to discourage Indonesian banks to lend to small businesses. Loans to deposits or lending proportions emerges to be the most important factor enhancing bank efficiency, whilst bank size and bank deposits are the foremost factors influencing the lending propensity of Indonesian banks over the study period.