Efficiency of European banking systems: A correction by environment variables

In this paper we extend the efficiency cross-country comparisons to ten European countries in order to know how different or similar current banking performances are. We start with two types of comparisons. First of all, we evaluate the average technical efficiency of each country by means of a DEA model called basic model. This model includes only banking variables. Our second model, called complete, does consider environmental variables together with the banking variables of the basic model. The empirical results recommended us to substitute the original environmental variables with new codified variables. Finally, the non homogeneity of the country-samples, observed after performing an individual DEA analysis for each country, was decisive for considering two new models, based on a modified sample. The comparisons between the last two models show that the country specific environmental conditions exercise a strong influence over the average efficiency score of each country.