The growing competition in the banking market observed in recent years and the prospect of competition at the European Union level that Polish banks will be facing have caused that the issues of efficiency and competitiveness constitute an important element of assessing a commercial bank's operation. In addition to that Poland's accession to the European Union entails certain threats and opportunities for the Polish banking sector, including the potentially increasing competitive pressure on Polish banks.

Technical efficiency and economy of scale are the most important factors of commercial banks' competitiveness. Therefore it is important to compare the technical efficiency of the Polish banking sector with and the performance of other countries that have accessed the EU together with Poland, or had become member states before. The paper presents a comparative analysis of the Polish banking sector's technical efficiency versus other countries of the CEC5 group (the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary) and the select EU member states (Greece, Spain and Portugal). The analysis is based on the BankScope database and uses non-parameterized DEA methodology for the years 1997-2001.

The study of the technical efficiency of the reviewed countries was based on Grigorian's and Manole's research dated from 2002. The categorization of expenditures an and performance of the banking technology based on the Value-Added Approach(VAA) was applied in the analysis.

Comparing banks' technical efficiency measures in the analyzed countries, it seems that there are no significant differences in technical efficiency distribution in the countries under the comparative analysis. The forecasted economic growth and regulatory changes related to the specific provision calculation method are expected to cause the improvement of the quality of the loan portfolio of commercial banks in Poland, which will have a positive impact on Poland's technical efficiency results in comparison with the analyzed countries.