Banking industry liberalisation in Ghana

Economic liberalisation is characterised by the entry of foreign companies and the emergence of new domestic institutions to compete with the existing institutions of lending, and there is a view that the process leads to greater efficiency, especially because foreign banks bring new expertise. Extracting information from accounts lodged with Ghana Central Bank, this paper ranks the cost efficiency of banks, Theil decomposition of the cost efficiency scores allows for a comparison of performance between banks under different types of ownership. There is pronounced differences in efficiency scores within and between groups by type of ownership, but foreign ownership, per se, is not the determining factor.