"After the financial crisis, countries around the world significantly expanded the objectives and powers of central banks. As central banks have acquired more powers, the trade-off between independence and accountability has become more complex and as a result, the pre-crisis academic consensus around central bank independence has broken down. Popular discontent towards central banks is growing. A new model of central bank independence is needed."--Abstract.
The specific role of central bank independence in determining the overall credibility of monetary policy is addressed in this paper. It is argued that the credibility of delegating monetary policy to an independent central bank is endogenous to the credibility of the inflation target because a “conservative” inflation target may not be compatible with the fiscal policy stance. Also, lack of transparency in designing the institutional set-up is shown to be welfare-reducing.
In major advanced economies, including Australia, independent central banks have become established institutions. Yet there are reasons why the sustained presence of such an institution in a democratic society should be challenged. This paper considers the arguments usually advanced for central bank independence, and the underlying arguments for a failure of democracy including the standard argument based on the importance of central bank credibility. This argument depends crucially on the role of inflationary expectations on the actual inflation rate. We question whether the standard story is really relevant - and, if not, then independence depends on the argument that politicians may not always act in the best long-term interests of their constituencies but bankers are more likely to. We show that this is a questionable assumption. The post World War 2 development of Europe and the emergence of the European Central Bank is examined to illustrate our underlying proposition that Central bank independence is not the result of economic argument, but of political ones leading to suboptimal economic results.
In December 1999, prior to the forming of a Stockholm Centre for Commercial Law, an international symposium entitled Central Bank Independence was held at the Department of Law at Stockholm University in co-operation with the Swedish Central Bank (The Riksbank) and Queen Mary and Westfield College, London University. The participants were principally political, economic and legal specialists in the field, all with considerable international experience. This led to the topic being examined in detail from many different perspectives. This publication includes contributions by the participants and contains many important facts for those readers who wish to study and understand the different consequences of the yielding of control over financial policymaking by the traditional political organisations to a body of experts. For readers in some countries, who realise that the subject will revolutionise traditional Constitutional and Administrative Law, the topic and therefore this publication, cannot be ignored.
Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.
There has been growing interest recently in the scope for promoting monetary stability through the establishment of independent central banks. This paper reviews the issues involved in central bank independence against the background of arrangements in nine countries. The analysis suggests that detailed institutional arrangements would need to be carefully designed if the potential benefits of central bank independence are to be delivered. Particularly important are the nature of arrangements to resolve various types of conflicts involving monetary policy, and arrangements to promote accountability and public monitoring of monetary policy performance.
