The Impact Of Financial Sector Policies On Banking In Ghana PDF Download

A major financial sector reform program has been implemented in Ghana since the early 1980s, involving financial liberalization and institutional reforms. Financial reforms became necessary, because the pre-reform policies together with acute and prolonged economic crisis had severely damaged the financial system. In the early 1990s, the government launched financial market liberalization policies under the financial sector adjustment program to restructure the distressed banks and clean up nonperforming assets in order to restore banks to profitability and viability. The study investigated the market structure of Ghana's banking industry and determined whether the market structure has been changed after the financial restructuring. This study specifically measures the degree of competition of the banking system in Ghana by using the H-statistic. Various studies on the degree of competition were reviewed. This study employs a widely used nonstructural methodology put forward by Panzar and Rosse (1987)---the H-statistic---and draws upon comprehensive average annual data from the various issues of the Bank of Ghana annual reports from 1988 to 2008. Maximum likelihood techniques were used to estimate the model. Based on the reported H-statistic for pre and postliberalization (2.35657 and 3.27530 respectively), it can be concluded that Ghana's banks are operating under perfect competition. However, the test for a change in competition status at the time of liberalization was not significant, indicating no evidence of a change in competition as a result of liberalization. The result of the market equilibrium reveals that the market equilibrium equals zero, revealing the existence of long-run equilibrium making the Panzar and Rosse model meaningful to interpret. The findings are consistent with the results obtained by Yuan (2006) who found Chinese banking market to be near perfect competition. This study has extended and strengthened some earlier results on bank competition in Ghana. However, the results of this study are different from the study undertaken by Buchs and Mathisen (2005), who found Ghanaian banking markets to operate under monopolistic conditions without considering the effect of liberalization. Three innovations of the current study are the use of comprehensive data source, the consideration of longer period of time covering two decades (1988--2008) and the incorporation of liberalization factors. Overall, the Panzar and Rosse model is regarded as a valuable tool for assessing the banking market conditions in Ghana. Since a bank's revenue is more likely to be observable than output prices and quantities or actual costs.