Central Bank Independence and its Effect on Inflation Performance in the ESCWA Countries (United Nations Publication, E/ESCWA/EDGD/2011/WP.2, New York, 2011) (original) (raw)

Measuring the Independence of Central Banks and Its Effect on Policy Outcomes

World Bank Economic Review, 1992

Making the central bank an agency with the mandate and reputation for maintaining price stability is a means by which a government can choose the strength of its commitment to price stability. This article develops four measures of central bank independence and explores their relation with inflation outcomes. An aggregate legal index is developedforfour decades in 72 countries. Three indicators of actual independence are developed: the rate of turnover of central bank governors, an index based on a questionnaire answered by specialists in 23 countries, and an aggregation of the legal index and the rate of turnover.

Central Bank independence and inflation: Evidence from emerging countries

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2011

This paper is mainly devoted to an empirical study of the legal and real independence of the Tunisian Central Bank as well as to estimating the correlation between the inflationary bias and the real independence of the emerging countries while applying new data sources. Our contribution consists, particularly, in measuring the indicators of legal and real Central Bank independence through applying, respectively, the Jacome and Cukierman's (1992) methods. In a second part, we are carrying out a descriptive and comparative analysis of inflation relative to the Maghreb countries designed to check the inflationary bias reduction. However, the third part is consecrated to the study of correlation between the real independence and the inflationary bias, performed over a sample of emerging countries with a panel estimation ranging over the period 1971-2004. Our results conform those achieved by , showing an acceptable proxy of the real and legal independence as well as the beneficial effects stemming from inflation. These findings conform those of De Haan (2007) and confirm a positive and non-significant correlation between real independence and inflation. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Society for Policy Modeling

The Level of Central Bank Independence in Developed and Developing Countries

2017

This LLM dissertation offers a comparative examination of varying levels of Central Bank Independence in pursuit of monetary policy in developed and developing countries, looking particularly at the situation in developing countries in the Caribbean (Belize, Barbados and Jamaica) as compared to developed countries such as the United Kingdom (UK). The author explains the range of factors that can be taken into consideration to measure the level of CBI. Chapter 1 focus on the functions of a CB with particular emphasis on monetary policy and price stability as the primary objective of a CB as well as financial stability and its regulatory role in the financial system. Chapter 2 gives an overview of CBI, its importance and discusses the different types of CBI and its relation with accountability. Chapter 3 measures the level of CBI in the selected Caribbean jurisdictions using their CB’s Acts. An analysis is done based on the four (4) legal indicators stipulated in the Cukierman, Webb a...

Central Bank Independence in the World: A New Dataset

2016

This article introduces the most comprehensive dataset on de jure central bank independence (CBI), including yearly data from 182 countries between 1970 and 2012. The dataset identifies statutory reforms affecting CBI, their direction, and the attributes necessary to build the Cukierman, Webb and Neyapty index. Previous datasets focused on developed countries, and included non-representative samples of developing countries. This dataset's substantially broader coverage has important implications. First, it challenges the conventional wisdom about central bank reforms in the world, revealing CBI increases and restrictions in decades and regions previously considered barely affected by reforms. Second, the inclusion almost 100 countries usually overlooked in previous studies suggests that sample selection may have substantially affected results. Simple analyses show that the associations between CBI and inflation, unemployment or growth are very sensitive to sample selection. Finally, the dataset identifies numerous CBI decreases (restrictions), whereas previous datasets mostly look at CBI increases. These data's coverage not only allows researchers to test competing explanations of the determinants and effects of CBI in a global sample, but it also provides a useful instrument for cross-national studies in diverse fields, such as liberalization, diffusion, political institutions, democratization, or responses to financial crises.

Central Bank Independence and Price Stability Under Alternative Political Regimes: A Global Evidence

Buletin ekonomi moneter dan perbankan, 2022

In this paper, we explore the connection between Central Bank Independence (CBI) and inflation under alternative political regimes. We formulate a predictive model that accommodates CBI in the analysis of inflation and thereafter we regroup the countries based on the choice of political regimes as well as the level of development. We find that CBI has a statistically significant and negative effect on inflation in countries adopting full democratic and partial autocratic regimes; but are statistically insignificant in countries operating full autocratic and partial democratic regimes. The results leading to this conclusion are robust to different levels of development.

Quest for the best: How to measure central bank independence and show its relation with inflation?

Discussion Papers, 2008

The objective of this paper is to check measures for explanatory power of central bank independence (CBI) in a series of econometric tests. Measures of central bank autonomy offer a useful expression of the extent to which a central bank is able to keep the government away from influencing a change in the inflation rate. The more a measure represents this idea, the more easily one can find a relation between the CBI value and the inflation rate. Results of estimations show that proxies by Grilli et al. (1991) are strong regressors of inflation rate, contrary to those by Cukierman et al. (1992). Moreover, estimation results challenge the belief that divergences in CBI-inflation rate estimations are due to differences in institutional features across samples of countries, not to differences in legal proxies of central bank independence. Already results from a homogenous group of industrial countries indicate that some indices perform ``better'' than others. Keywords: central bank independence, political autonomy, economic autonomy, institution, estimation JEL codes: E58, E52

Central Bank Independence and Economic Performance

Cyprus Economic Policy Review, 2009

This paper examines the influence that several factors may have on the relationship between legal Central Bank Independence (CBI), on the one hand, and the inflation and real GDP growth on the other. Using multivariate regression analysis for 39 OECD during the two periods, 1991-1998 and 1999-2006, we show that even if we include several control variables in the regression, the negative relationship between CBI and inflation, and the lack of relationship between CBI and the variability of real GDP growth remaining were unaffected. Also, we decompose the index of CBI into its four components and we examine whether they matter for inflation, for real GDP growth and for the sacrifice ratio.

Central Bank Independence, Economic Growth and Inflation: Theories and Empirical Validations

International Journal of Applied Economics, Finance and Accounting

Economics theory's assumption is that a central bank's independence from political power entails a split between political and monetary power. Such a split is unavoidable in order to control price instability without harming other macroeconomic variables such as growth or unemployment. The theory calling for central bank autonomy, started as early as the 1970s and still gaining ground, assumes the role of central banks as an arrangement sin qua non for tying the hands of government and consequently reducing inflationary bias, or even eliminating this scourge. Moreover, such a debate is mostly relevant for monetary policy, because of its inherent incredibility. Then, our aim in this study is to test the relevance of an anti-inflationary policy, reflected in freeing the central bank from the grip of political power, to combat inflation. To this end, we examine samples of developed countries (20 countries) and developing countries (37 countries) observed over the two study periods 1997-2006 and 2007-2016. We found that high-inflation countries and atypical countries biased our results, for both inflation rates and variability. This finding remains valid even after the introduction of a set of political and economic variables likely to affect inflation.

On the Relationship between Central Bank’s Independence and Inflation Rate in Iran

The purpose of present paper was to examine the relationship between central bank independence and inflation rate in Iran over 1960-2008. First, central bank independence has been accomplished through three indices including legal and real CBI indices and turnover rate of central bank governor index. Then, Augmented Dickey-Fuller test for model stationary of variables has been done by applying Eviews software. In addition, the relationship among the central bank independence indices and average inflation rate and its variability in Iran’s economy has been investigated using Eviews and Microfit softwares. Necessary data for calculating CBI index were obtained from Cukierman criteria (LCBI). Furthermore, real CBI index was gathered via standard questionnaire and turnover rate of central bank governor index data were collected through library survey. The results showed a negative relationship among real CBI and inflation and its variability. The relationship between legal CBI and infla...

Measuring the Degree of Central Bank Independence in Egypt

Working Papers, 2007

The past few years have witnessed a trend of increased delegation of authority to central banks. Increasing central bank independence is a recommended strategy for governments to establish a credible commitment to price stability as the final objective of the monetary authority, even at the cost of other objectives that may be more appealing to the political authorities. Existing literature on measuring central bank independence focuses on developed countries where quantifying the independence of central banks is easier, since quantifying the legal charter is sufficient to reflect the degree of central bank independence. However, in developing countries this task is thorny as quantifying the legal charter is often insufficient, since laws are often incomplete, ambiguous, or simply not respected. Thus, quantifying other indicators that reflect actual practice is required to capture any divergence between legal and actual practices. This paper attempts to quantify the degree of independence in the central bank of Egypt (CBE), from both a legal and behavioural context, since its establishment in 1961 until 2004. The study uses four indices in line with the work of Jacome (2001), Cukierman, et al. (1992), and Cukierman and Webb (1995), where each index is designed in such a way to capture a somewhat different aspect of independence. This study captures the discrepancies between the degree of independence conferred to the CBE by law and actual practice. The empirical findings of this paper offers insights about the direction of efforts that should be made to enhance central bank independence which is the key to achieving price stability and the stability of the financial system in general.