Banking Competition in Africa: Sub-regional Comparative Studies

This paper examines the extent of banking competition in African sub-regional markets. A dynamic version of the Panzar-Rosse model is adopted beside the static model to assess the overall extent of banking competition in each sub-regional banking market over the period 2002 to 2009. Consistent with other emerging economies, the results suggest that African banks generally demonstrate monopolistic competitive behaviour. Although the evidence suggests that the static Panzar-Rosse H-statistic is downward biased compared to the dynamic version, the competitive nature identified remains robust to alternative estimators.