Financial liberalisation, bank excess liquidity and lending: A bank-level study for the economy of Bangladesh

One of the main aims of financial liberalisation was to increase banking sector competition. Different policies were prescribed for this with one of the ultimate objectives being that banks would be able to lend without any constraint. If banks are able to lend their deposits fully then there will be no excess liquidity in the banking sector; even a significant increase of lending will imply reduction in excess liquidity. However, it is observed that although the process of financial liberalisation started around the early 1990s for most of the developing economies, still there is substantial excess liquidity problem in the banking sector in these countries, including Bangladesh. This study examined the possible reasons for excess liquidity and lending in Bangladesh using bank-level data of 37 banks for the period of 1997-2011 applying panel estimation methods. The first empirical chapter analysed how financial liberalisation affected the excess liquidity situation in banks. The second chapter examined how excess liquidity was related with business cycle and the recent financial crisis. The final empirical chapter looked at how financial liberalisation was related to lending. One key contribution of this study is that it applied an index of financial liberalisation to identify the process and its effect more comprehensively. Another important contribution of this research is to see if there were any definite patterns for different bank typologies. To address this, four bank-specific characteristics of ownership, size, mode of operation and age were used. Financial liberalisation was found to have significant positive relationship with excess liquidity as well as for lending for all types of banks. It was also observed that business cycle had a significant positive impact on excess liquidity. However less significant relationship between the financial crisis and excess liquidity showed the resilience of the banking sector in Bangladesh during the crisis. When bank-specific characteristics were analysed, the results showed that public banks had higher growth of excess liquidity and lower lending than private banks and new banks had lower growth of excess liquidity and higher lending than old banks. No definite differences could be observed between Islamic and conventional banks. It was also observed that public banks acted less procyclically than the private banks while large and new banks acted more procyclically than their counterparts. For the recent financial crisis, it is concluded that large and new banks had more excess liquidity than their counterparts while other typologies were found to be indifferent. Analysis of significant positive impact of financial liberalisation on both lending and excess liquidity suggested that prudent lending by banks to avoid loan default in the face of increased risk was a key for this parallel movement. Differences in interest rate according to bank-specific characteristics are found to be influential for the significant variations according to bank typologies