Analysing Islamic Bank Efficiency in Malaysia Using the Standard and Alternative Approaches to Data Envelopment Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of Islamic banks in Malaysia using both the standard approach and the alternative approach to Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The standard approach relies on linear averages of outputs and inputs to measure efficiency whereas the alternative approach uses nonlinear averages. Both approaches are tested on 14 Islamic banks in Malaysia for the three-year period, 2008 to 2010. Our overall results for the three years suggest that, the inefficiency level among these banks using the standard approach (SDEA) is much higher than using the alternative approach (ADEA). Implications and future research are also discussed