The sum of the stock of direct investment made by financial institutions in Brazil in 2000 and the flow that occurred between 2001 and 2006 is about $ 22.23 billion. In this process, investors are looking to overcome market imperfections by internally undertaking transactions previously carried out in the international market. This allows the specific benefits of this market to be transformed into specific advantages of the company, which can be more widely taken advantage of by means of internationalization. From the point of view of recipient countries, opening up to foreign capital was based on the expectation of obtaining benefits as a result of the increase in competition. This study sought to identify whether foreign-owned banks were more efficient than domestic banks between 2001 and 2005 by application of Stochastic Frontier Analysis. The results showed that the performance of foreign-owned banks was not systematically superior to that of Brazilian-owned banks , and that there was no technical progress in banking in Brazil.
Banks; international banking; economic and financial performance of banks; X-Efficiency; Stochastic Frontier Analysis
