Ownership Reform, Foreign Competition and Efficiency of Chinese Commercial Banks: A Non‐parametric Approach

Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the pressure for bank reforms has mounted as China ought to have fully opened up its financial market to foreign competition by 2006. Efficiency is key for domestic banks to survive in a liberalised environment, but it appears that the last hope for raising bank efficiency is through ownership reform. Whether ownership reform and foreign competition can solve China's banking problem remains to be tested. This paper aims to answer this question using a non‐parametric approach to analyse the efficiency changes of 15 large commercial banks during 1998–2005. We find that ownership reform and foreign competition have forced Chinese commercial banks to improve performance, as their total factor productivity rose by 5.6 per cent per annum. This coincides with the recent bullish Chinese stock markets led by three listed state‐owned commercial banks. Despite such encouraging results, we remain cautious about the future of Chinese banks, as the good results may have been artificially created with massive government support and the fundamentals of the banks may be still weak.