Thai financial sector efficiency prior to the East Asian financial crisis

This paper looks at whether differences in the form of ownership were not the cause of the productivity differences but that these differences were due to individual firm effects. We also want to examine the belief that inefficiency in the Thai financial sector was not one of the causal factors in the currency crisis in 1997 with a high level of overall efficiency and some firms outperforming this norm. A regression of total revenue on capital, labour, company dummies and time dummies reveals that the average growth rate of total revenue allowing for changes in labour and capital and inter-firm efficiency differences was 3.6% for the period 1989 to 1996. The same regression also provides evidence that in the Thai insurance sector, larger companies are more efficient. However, no such similar evidence exists for the Thai banking sector.