The non-monotonic relationship between financial integration and cost efficiency: Evidence from East Asian commercial banks

The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 triggered a discussion about a potential reversal in the global expansion of international banking that had begun in the 1960s (European Central Bank, 2012). Further, since the 1990s, policy makers such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have softened their insistence on full financial liberalization and have allowed more space for the employment of macro-prudential policies and capital account management tools (International Monetary Fund, 2012). In practice, after the global financial crisis, a major change in the international banking landscape was the retrenchment of developed (notably European) banks in terms of international intermediating activities (World Bank, 2018) (see Fig. 1). The changes described above have ensured that there is continued academic and policy interest in studying the impact of financial integration with regard to the level of financial integration.