Metafrontier cost Malmquist productivity index: an application to Taiwanese and Chinese commercial banks

摘要

This study applies the data envelopment analysis approach and extends the group-specific cost Malmquist (CM) productivity index of Maniadakis and Thanassoulis (Eur J Oper Res 154:396–409, 2004) to define the meta CM productivity index under meta production technology. Parallel to the technology gap defined in the relationship between a group-specific adopted technology and its meta potential technology, we define a CM gap as the ratio of two CM productivity indices that measure the convergence of the group-specific cost frontier to the meta cost frontier and develop a further decomposition of the CM gap. To implement the decompositions of the CM index and CM gap, the research empirically examines panel data of 27 Taiwanese banks and 18 Chinese banks covering the period 2006–2009.