This article evaluates the performance of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) banking industry in the context of the Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) hypothesis in the period 1993 to 2002. This article uses panel estimation differentiating between bank fixed effects and country fixed effects. It examines the Relative-Market-Power (RMP) and the Efficient-Structure (ES) hypotheses differentiating between the two by employing a nonparametric measure of technical efficiency, and finds that the banking industry in the Arab GCC countries is best explained by the mainstream SCP hypothesis. The empirical results do not find any support for the Hicks’ (1935) ‘Quiet Life’ (QL) version of the market power hypothesis.

This paper estimates the VAT revenue maximising rate of VAT for the European Union for given conditions of non-compliance and other black economy transactions. It estimates a Laffer curve for the standard rate of VAT using a pooled sample of data of revenue statistics for 14 countries in the EU. The results confirm that the efficiency of the VAT system declines as the VAT rate increases. The decline in efficiency is due to a mixture of a reduction in the VAT base, and VAT evasion and avoidance. As a result of the single market, the EU Commission has proposed a common or closely converged rate of VAT within Europe. The actual common rate of VAT has yet to be decided. This paper contributes to this policy debate.

This paper explores the geography of bank lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and tests the argument that large institutions with complex organizational structures are better able to filter ‘hard’ information than ‘soft’ information. Mortgage lending is used as a control to illustrate the case of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information. Using data on individual bank lending to SMEs and mortgages by postcode area in Great Britain for the period 2013(2)–2014(4), the paper explains the spatial dispersion of SME lending in the UK in terms of geographical distance and supports the policy of establishing a geographically decentralized financial system as a counterbalance.