This study examines the factors affecting deposit growth in selected private commercial banks in Ethiopia. An explanatory research design was applied using secondary panel data from 2013 to 2022, covering 12 private commercial banks selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected from the National Bank of Ethiopia, the World Bank, and banks’ annual reports . Panel regression techniques are employed, with fixed-effects models and clustered standard errors used as the preferred specification. The results show that customer growth and capital adequacy have a strong and statistically significant positive effect on deposit growth (p 0.01), while foreign remittance growth is also positively associated with deposits (p 0.05). Treasury-bill rates exhibit a positive effect in some model specifications (p 0.10), whereas government expenditure is found to be negatively and significantly related to deposit growth (p 0.05). In contrast, GDP growth, inflation, and branch expansion do not show robust effects across models. Robustness checks using alternative estimators and diagnostic tests confirm the reliability of the findings. The study contributes to the limited empirical literature on deposit dynamics in Ethiopian private banks by employing a decade-long panel dataset and incorporating additional macroeconomic variables, notably Treasury-bill rates and government expenditure, while providing policy-relevant insights for banks and monetary authorities.
Worku Adelegn (Fri,) studied this question.