This paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale and scope among the stock exchanges. Evidence from 38 exchanges in 32 countries and 4 continents around the world for the years 1989–1998 portrays the existence of significant economies of scale and scope. The degree of such scale and scope however differs across size and regions. The largest exchanges show an increasing trend of cost effectiveness. The exchanges in North America and Europe report substantially higher economies of scale relative to the exchanges in the Asia-Pacific regions.

The paper analyzes bank performance in the context of the integrated European Union market and its member countries. First, the paper investigates the technical efficiency of banks in each country sample using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model incorporating only banking variables. Then, a second DEA model is defined incorporating environmental factors together with banking variables in order to standardize the country-specific environmental conditions. Based on these models, the paper systematically analyzes the efficiency position for each of the European banking industry if average banks decide to operate in any other country. The results indicate that adverse (advantageous) environmental conditions are a positive (negative) factor for the home banking industry and being technically efficient appears to be a significant deterrence to foreign competition.