Empirical Analysis on Banks Efficiency in the Context of the Financial Crisis: the Case of the New EU Member States and Candidate Countries

The European Union enlargement is a process that has taken place over the last 50 years. The main characteristic of this process is that countries are accepted as new members of the EU once their economies have reached a suitable convergence level. Since the banking sector represents the main channel through which the economy is financed, especially in the case of the new member countries and also in the case of the candidate countries, it becomes obvious that its integration plays a key role in the overall European integration process. In another train of thoughts, the financial and economic downturn has affected almost without exception all of the EU member countries. Thus, the aim of our research is to estimate the banks efficiency from three relatively homogenous groups of countries that are having different levels of economic development and are involved in different stages of the European integration process and the impact that the financial and economic downturn had on it. In order to achieve this we have employed a Data Envelopment Analysis, using data from the Bankscope - Bureau van Dijk database. The analysed period is 2003-2010, this allowing us to underline the development prior and post the start of the crisis. The obtained results underline that, despite adverse macroeconomic conditions, the analysed countries were able to obtain positive results in the catching-up process, but still registering an efficiency gap in the banking intermediation process.