Współczynnik wypłacalności jako miara adekwatności kapitałowej banków w Polsce
The Capital Adequacy Ratio as a Measure of the Safeness and Financial Stability of Banks in Poland

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents one of the most important measures in the Polish banking sector, the Capital Adequacy Ratio, which since 1990 has been an indicator of the safety and financial stability at particular banks and throughout the banking system. At the beginning, the measure originally provided information about the equity coverage of credit risk. Over the last 20 years it has been systematically modified, as further risks were identified in the banking industry. All those changes were accompanied by variations of the definition of bank equity. The modifications of legal regulations led to inconsistency in CAR values in groups of commercial and cooperative banks. The aim of this paper is to present those legislative changes which had a significant impact on the metric’s formula in the years 1990–2009, and to answer the following questions: – were there any significant differences between the values of CAR in groups of commercial and cooperative banks in the years 2002–2009? – were groups of banks threatened with an inappropriate CAR value? – did the changes in legal acts affect changes in the value of the measure analysed? – was the growth of risk accompanied by a sufficient increase in the groups’ equity? Empirical analysis was conducted on financial data published by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority.

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