Over the last two decades, the unprecedented expansion of cross-border banking on the African banking market has raised concern about their effects on host countries’ markets. This paper investigates to what extent this expansion has affected competition and cost efficiency in the African banking market using a sample of 429 active commercial banks from 2000 to 2015. Results show that CBB activities enhance competition, mainly driven by African CBB. At the regional scale, these effects are more substantial in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) because African CBBs have more expanded their activities in SSA. We also document that more efficient banks alleviate the competition induced by the expansion of African CBBs. The latter exhibit lower efficiency and therefore do not encourage bank efficiency. This study further shows that macroeconomic conditions and institutional variables are essential drivers of bank competition and cost efficiency in Africa. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques (system-GMM, Quantile regression-Adaptative MCMC, Matching) and proxies of competition and cost efficiency.

在过去的二十年里，跨境银行业务在非洲银行市场上空前扩张，引发了人们对其对东道国市场影响的担忧。本文使用 2000 年至 2015 年间 429 家活跃商业银行的样本，调查了这种扩张在多大程度上影响了非洲银行市场的竞争和成本效率。结果表明，CBB 活动增强了竞争，主要是由非洲 CBB 推动的。在区域范围内，这些影响在撒哈拉以南非洲 (SSA) 更为显着，因为非洲 CBB 在 SSA 中扩大了活动范围。我们还记录了更高效的银行缓解了由非洲 CBB 扩张引起的竞争。后者表现出较低的效率，因此不鼓励银行效率。这项研究进一步表明，宏观经济条件和制度变量是非洲银行竞争和成本效率的重要驱动因素。这些结果对于替代估计技术（系统-GMM、分位数回归-自适应 MCMC、匹配）以及竞争和成本效率的代理是稳健的。