Assessing the Impact of Banking Reforms on the Performance of the Banking Industry in Nigeria

This work is concerned with the study of the impact of banking reforms and the performance of the banking industry in Nigeria. The choice of this topic is justified by the fact that the performance of the banking sector is fundamental to the maintenance of macroeconomic stability, which is sine qua non for sustainable growth and development. In conducting the research the authors used some performance indicators like CAMEL which is an acronym for capital adequacy, asset quality, management proficiency, earning and liquidity; bank assets to the gross domestic product (GDP), bank deposits to GDP, bank loans and advances to GDP; the distribution of commercial bank branches for a selected period; the distribution of loans and advances between the more productive and less productive sectors; the distribution of bank credit to small scale enterprises in order to know the changes in them arising from banking reform. It was also found that the challenges facing the regulatory authorities in promoting a sound, stable and efficient financial system are enormous and require the strengthening of each institution’s regulatory framework and capacity as well as maintaining effective coordination of various regulatory efforts to avoid conflict of roles and duplication of efforts. Although the Nigerian financial system has undergone substantial changes over the last two decades in terms of the number and breadth of instruments in the money and capital markets which also holds good for the economic environment and the regulatory framework within which it operates, the system remains by and large under-developed since it is yet to achieve that degree of financial intermediation or financial deepening which the economy requires to foster growth and development. Going by our analysis the choice for future policy options for banking sector reforms would be to bolster the reforms towards a clearly neo-classical supply side economics beyond the ambivalence of Say’s classical and Keynesian monetary stance.