Central Bank Independence Accountability And Transparency

This book explores three key areas of central banking and governance - autonomy, accountability and transparency. It looks at links between the areas, as well as assessing the impact of central bank autonomy on macroeconomic performance. The issues are approached from theoretical and empirical perspectives.

This book explores three key areas of central banking and governance - autonomy, accountability and transparency. It looks at links between the areas, as well as assessing the impact of central bank autonomy on macroeconomic performance. The issues are approached from theoretical and empirical perspectives.

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.

Ten years after the financial crises of 2008, the governance of central banks continues to be a critical area of debate-embedded in this are the key aspects of central bank independence, accountability and transparency. Accordingly, several key questions have emerged regarding the role, functioning and governance of central banks: -What should the key priorities of central banks be in terms of mandates?-Given these pressing real time mandates of central banks, how to make them more strategically and operationally accountable while preserving their strategic and operational autonomy?-What implications do the above have for central bank governance and transparency of central bank operations?-How to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency and adaptability of central bank functioning, especially in terms of ensuring the development of a stable, inclusive and accountable financial sector? In this seminal work, Ramesh S Arunachalam-a professional with 30 years of multi-country experience in finance, technology and regulation-explores the above questions and provides pragmatic suggestions on how the autonomy of central banks can be preserved while at the same time ensuring that central banks remain accountable to the people at large in their respective countries.

This paper examines the current level of central bank independence (CBI) and transparency in a broad sample of countries using newly constructed measures, and looks at the evolution in both measures from an earlier time period. Increases in CBI have tended to occur in more democratic countries and in countries with high levels of past inflation. More independent central banks in turn tend to be more transparent, while transparency is also positively correlated with measures of national institutional quality. Exploiting the time dimension of our data to eliminate country fixed effects and using instrumental variable estimation to overcome endogeneity concerns, we present evidence that greater CBI is associated with lower inflation. We also find that enhanced transparency practices are associated with the private sector making greater use of information provided by the central bank.

A central bank needs authority and a sphere of independent action. But a central bank cannot become an unelected czar with sweeping, unaccountable discretionary power. How can we balance the central bank's authority and independence with needed accountability and constraints? Drawn from a 2015 Hoover Institution conference, this book features distinguished scholars and policy makers' discussing this and other key questions about the Fed.

Tucker presents guiding principles for ensuring that central bankers and other unelected policymakers remain stewards of the common good.