Total Factor Productivity Growth and Its Decomposition: An Assessment of the Indian Banking Sector in the True Liberalised Era

Assessments of the performance of Indian commercial banks are not new in the literature. However, most of the earlier studies consider relatively partial measures such as technical efficiency of the banks in assessing their performance. In this paper they have considered overall (Malmquist) total factor productivity improvement achieved by 68 Indian commercial banks from 1998-99 to 2006-07, the true liberalised era in some senses, and decomposed it into the three of its economically meaningful components, namely technical change, technical efficiency change and scale (efficiency) change factor using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. [Working Paper No. 435]