IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/kiepwp/2022_001.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

COVID-19 and the Health of Banking Sector in Japan and South Korea: A Comparative Study

Author

Listed:

Abstract

1. The economies of Japan and South Korea are dominated by banks. 2. This study aims to identify and assess the health of domestic banks in Japan and South Korea for the Covid-19 ex-ante and interim periods. 3. Japanese banks are divided into four clusters, i.e., City Banks, Regional Banks I, Regional Banks II, and Trust Banks. 4. Throughout the timeframe of our investigation, the BOJ and BOK de-ployed monetary policy measures to influence bank conditions. 5. Figures show that the total assets of Japanese banks increased continu-ously, albeit at varied rates, from 2010 to 2019, never falling below 2 per-cent. The increase in bank loan amounts, from ¥8 trillion in 2012 to ¥543.9 trillion in 2021, explains some of the banks’ asset expansion. 6. Japanese banks had relatively low net earnings against their assets in terms of productivity, resulting in a poor return on assets (ROA). 7. Japanese banks’ ordinary profits peaked at 7.39 percent in 2014 and have steadily declined. However, the operational profit data from 2015 to 2020 has formed a U-shaped curve, indicating recent improvement. At the same time, banks' net incomes were significantly lower than their op-erating profits. 8. The efficiency of Japanese banks has remained low for a long time. From 2011 to 2021, none of the Japanese bank clusters met even the less strict efficiency standard of 60%. Even though Covid-19 might the-oretically cut operational expenses, Japanese banks’ overall efficiency ra-tio in 2021 was 83.9 percent. We are constrained by the Korean banks’ operational efficiency data. However, available data for 2020, the year of the COVID-19 outbreak, shows that most of them maintained an effi-ciency ratio of 60% or less. 9. Since 2012, Japanese banks have reduced the percentage of non-performing loans to total loans. Between 2012 and 2020, however, the ratio fell from 2.4 to 1.1 percent. Due to Covid-19, the NPL ratio went marginally up to 1.2 percent in 2021. At the same time, Korean banks had significantly lower NPL ratios than Japanese banks. All banks’ total NPL was 0.25 percent of their loans in 2020. 10. Despite their differences, the study revealed that Korean domestic banks could sustain better health indicators than their Japanese counterparts for much of the study period. Banks in Japan are trying to maintain bet-ter financial health with the ultra-low interest rates imposed by the QE-2 monetary policy. During Covid-19, the profitability and efficiency of the sector have been adversely affected.

Suggested Citation

  • Barai, Munim Kumar, 2022. "COVID-19 and the Health of Banking Sector in Japan and South Korea: A Comparative Study," Working Papers 22-1, Korea Institute for International Economic Policy.
  • Handle: RePEc:ris:kiepwp:2022_001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.kiep.go.kr/gallery.es?mid=a10105020000&bid=0001&act=view&list_no=10246&cg_code=C08
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Banks; Japan; South Korea; portfolio; productivity; operating efficiency; Covid-19;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:kiepwp:2022_001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Juwon Seo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/kieppkr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.