​ The goal of this book is to assess the efficacy of India’s financial deregulation programme by analyzing the developments in cost efficiency and total factor productivity growth across different ownership types and size classes in the banking sector over the post-deregulation years. The work also gauges the impact of inclusion or exclusion of a proxy for non-traditional activities on the cost efficiency estimates for Indian banks, and ranking of distinct ownership groups. It also investigates the hitherto neglected aspect of the nature of returns-to-scale in the Indian banking industry. In addition, the work explores the key bank-specific factors that explain the inter-bank variations in efficiency and productivity growth. Overall, the empirical results of this work allow us to ascertain whether the gradualist approach to reforming the banking system in a developing economy like India has yielded the most significant policy goal of achieving efficiency and productivity gains. The authors believe that the findings of this book could give useful policy directions and suggestions to other developing economies that have embarked on a deregulation path or are contemplating doing so.

The goal of this book is to assess the efficacy of India's financial deregulation programme by analyzing the developments in cost efficiency and total factor productivity growth across different ownership types and size classes in the banking sector over the post-deregulation years. The work also gauges the impact of inclusion or exclusion of a proxy for non-traditional activities on the cost efficiency estimates for Indian banks, and ranking of distinct ownership groups. It also investigates the hitherto neglected aspect of the nature of returns-to-scale in the Indian banking industry. In addition, the work explores the key bank-specific factors that explain the inter-bank variations in efficiency and productivity growth. Overall, the empirical results of this work allow us to ascertain whether the gradualist approach to reforming the banking system in a developing economy like India has yielded the most significant policy goal of achieving efficiency and productivity gains. The authors believe that the findings of this book could give useful policy directions and suggestions to other developing economies that have embarked on a deregulation path or are contemplating doing so.

This book deals with the issue of convergence in efficiency levels among Indian public sector banks (PSBs) during the post-reforms. To accomplish the task of measuring technical efficiency for individual PSBs, we have used the increasing popular methodology of Data Envelopment Analysis. Further, we have utilized the traditional cross-sectional regression approach for investigating the presence of sigma- and beta-convergence in efficiency levels of PSBs. The empirical results indicate that the majority of PSBs have observed an ascent in technical efficiency during the post-reforms years. Further, the study confirms a presence of convergence phenomenon in the Indian public sector banking industry. This book will be useful for the research scholars intending to work on the efficiency and productivity analysis.