Efficiency of the banking system: The Italian case

This essay focuses on the situation of the Italian system in a European perspective. Several parties blame the limited size, the poorly diversified production, and the excessive capacity of this system. In the author’s view, recent ECB statistics and other empirical evidence seem to point out that the recent poor results of the Italian banking system mostly depend on a low credit quality and on a limited diversification of production. On the other hand, there are doubts with respect to the possibility to calculate univocal statistics for the Italian banking system, in the light of the marked difference observed between the Northern and Southern regions of the Country.