The Effect of Private Banks on Economic Efficiency of Banking Industry in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Policy-makers around the world have emphasized the virtues of deregulation. The banking industry in Iran has partly experienced reform after the domestic peivate banks entry since 2000. This study investigates the impact of this policy on economic efficiency of banking sector by using banking data over the period 1997-2006. We measured the economic efficiency of banks using SDEA which necessitated a grasp of technical and allocation efficiency and calculated the model by GAMS software. The purpose of stochastic setting of DEA is accommodating both the inefficiency and the presence of measurement errors. In the second step we used the fixed effect model on panel data to regress efficiency measures on policy variable of entry. We solved the regression model model by Eviews and Stata softwares. Our result show that entry variable has not meaningful effect on efficiency. So economic efficiency can not be differentiated on the basis of policy reform of entry.