Abstract
This study reveals new findings on efficiency performance using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis, SFA, to measure the overall efficiency of Indonesian banks over a recent unstudied period. SFA helps to determine factors affecting cost inefficiency and profit efficiency performance. Though productivity declined by just 2.2 percent, which is a result close to the efficient frontier by a small margin, is an improvement over what was a huge decline during the 1997-99 crisis and prior to the IMF-World Bank intervention to resuscitate the economy in 1998-2001. Banks’ cost inefficiency is found to be higher than profit efficiency, a result consistent with literature. Indonesian banks are about twice as inefficient as banks in developed countries in the overuse of inputs, thus there is huge challenge for management to improve efficiency. On testing for the sources of bank efficiency via SFA, bank size and non-performing loans or credit risk affect cost and profit efficiency negatively, a result consistent with similar findings from other countries. There has not been much attention paid to productivity measurement, and our findings provide a benchmark for future studies for comparison.