4.2 Cost and Profit Efficiency
The mean cost and profit efficiency measures are reported in Table 4. The overall mean cost efficiency is 1.784, while that of profit efficiency is 0.753. This means that the average banks could reduce its costs by 78.4 percent to improve its profits by 24.7 percent to match its performance to the level of the most efficient bank in the test: of course such an achievement for all banks may not be feasible, but it is an average figure. This finding confirms the earlier findings of previous studies of Bos and Kool (2005) for Netherlands. They also found that, in general, banks experienced higher profit efficiency than cost efficiency. Based on the study of small cooperative Dutch banks, they found that the banks needed to improve cost efficiency by 39.3 percent, compared to 8.7 percent room for improving their profit efficiency. Hence, compared to the scores in a developed banking system, the Indonesian banking efficiency is lot worse, in fact about twice as bad as in that case.