Productivity, efficiency, and non-performing loans in the Chinese banking industry

• We take the non-performing loans as an undesirable output into account.
• We explore the source of inefficiency in the Chinese banking industry.
• We develop a non-radial and non-oriented metafrontier-Luenberger productivity indicator.
• Non-interest income is the major source of inefficiency.
• The technology progress for scale change is the driving force for overall productivity growth.

In this paper, the directional distance function and the metafrontier-Luenberger productivity indicator are used to measure the efficiency and the total factor productivity in 25 Chinese commercial banks over the period between 2004 and 2010. It is found that the pure technical efficiency of the state-owned commercial banks is better than that of the joint-stock commercial banks and the city commercial banks, while non-interest income is the major source of inefficiency. In total, the Chinese banking industry performs well in terms of overall productivity. The technological scale change indicating the change of return to scale in technology is the driving force for overall productivity growth. However, the pure technical efficiency change and the pure technologic change are not significant, and the scale efficiency change has a negative effect to productivity. The potential technological relative change for the three groups is greater than zero.