中央银行独立性、责任性与通货膨胀目标制

近年来不少学者提出,我国货币政策应转向通货膨胀目标制。我国现行的政策实际上正是一种隐性的通货膨胀目标制,20世纪90年代以来所发生的几次通货膨胀偏倚很大程度上是由于央行的独立性不够。鉴于通货膨胀目标制并不能解决当前我国货币政策调控中的问题并可能带来更多的问题,今后货币政策改革应坚持由直接调控向间接调控、由数量型调控向价格型调控的转变思路,在提高央行独立性的同时,增强其责任性并提高货币政策的透明度。     

Reconsidering central bank independence

In this paper, we survey the case for central bank independence (CBI). We conclude that CBI is neither necessary nor sufficient for monetary stability. CBI is just one potentially useful monetary policy design instrument among several, and CBI should not be treated as an exogenous variable. Instead, the question that should be addressed is why societies decide to make their central banks independent? The reasons why CBI is chosen are related to legal, political, and economic systems. A number of empirical studies find correlations between CBI and low inflation rates. Endogeneity of CBI suggests, however, that the correlation has no implications for causality.     

Explaining peak inflation rates prior to disinflationary policy adjustments or what got us into this mess?

This study investigates, using annual data from 1974–2004, whether unionization rates, trade openness and central bank independence can help explain cross-national and inter-temporal variations in level of peak inflation prior to a disinflationary policy adjustment. I find that unionization is positively associated with both peak inflation rates whereas more independent central banks and trade openness are correlated with lower inflation levels. These results are robust to controlling for the high inflation decade of the 1970s and to using average (rather than peak) inflation as the explanatory variable.     

Transparency and central bank losses in developing countries

Recent evidence shows central banks suffering from losses in some developing countries. This is a surprise to economists and policymakers. At the same time, these banks are asked to conduct monetary policy within a more transparent framework. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the following question: Would more transparency in developing countries suffering from central bank losses be beneficial?This paper shows that the cost constraints of conducting monetary policy, central bank losses, in both transparency and opacity alike is significant and affects positively the error of the private sector in expected inflation rate and the output gap. In a country suffering from central bank losses, the expected benefits of transparency and the existence of cost constraint move in two opposite directions. As a result, it is unwise for developing countries suffering from central bank losses to focus on transparency. Priority should be given to fixing monetary policy and to developing financial markets.     

Inequality, inflation, and central bank independence

What can account for the different contemporaneous inflation experiences of various countries, and of the same country over time? We present an analysis of the determination of inflation from a political economy perspective. We document a positive correlation between income inequality and inflation and then present a theory of the determination of inflation outcomes in democratic societies that illustrates how greater inequality leads to greater inflation, owing to a desire by voters for wealth redistribution. We conclude by showing that democracies with more independent central banks tend to have better inflation outcomes for a given degree of inequality. JEL Classification E5, H0 Inégalité, inflation et l'indépendance de la banque centrale. Quels sont les facteurs qui pourraient expliquer les expériences inflationnistes tellement différentes des divers pays dans le passé récent, et l'expérience tellement différente d'un pays donné dans le temps? Les auteurs analysent ce problème de la détermination du taux d'inflation dans une perspective d'économie politique. Ils déterminent qu'il y a une corrélation positive entre l'inégalité et l'inflation, et présentent une théorie de la détermination de l'inflation dans les sociétés démocratiques qui montre comment une inégalité plus grande entraîne une inflation plus grande à cause du désir des électeurs de demander une redistribution de la richesse. Le mémoire montre en terminant que les démocraties e´quipées de banques centrales plus indépendantes tendent à avoir de meilleurs résultats en terme d'inflation pour un degré d'inégalité donné.     

Central Bank Independence in Transition Economies

The paper discusses recent changes in central bank laws and the relationship between inflation and central bank independence in transition economies. Two indices of legal independence are constructed, covering political and economic aspects of independence. Most of the countries experienced high-inflation episodes in the recent past and changes introduced to the laws after, or simultaneously, with stabilization programmes strengthened the position of the central banks. In further analysis, an inverse relationship emerges between inflation and indices of central bank independence. However, the robust relationship is present only at a high level of economic liberalization. This conclusion is supported by results from regressions on time-aggregated and panel data, even after controlling for the government fiscal position and the absence/presence of an IMF stabilization package.     

中央银行的宏观监管职能:经济效果与影响因素分析

文章以跨国数据为基础,对中央银行是否应分离银行监管职能这一问题进行了系统的实证分析。结果表明,在中央银行未分离或未完全分离银行监管职能的国家,其金融稳定性通常更高,经济增速更快,而且未出现明显的"通货膨胀倾向"。这意味着金融监管的独立性并不是简单地将监管职能从中央银行分离的问题,中央银行的独立性也并不必然排斥其继续实施金融监管职能。通过将货币政策和金融监管的兼容性置于政治经济学框架下加以解读,文章发现真正影响金融监管实际独立性的并非监管主体的设置问题,而是更广泛地依赖于不同的政治制度条件。上述结论表明,如何在既定的政治制度和政策框架下切实加强货币政策和金融监管的协调与配合才是问题的核心和关键。     

Central bank inability and Taylor rule in developing countries

This paper seeks to adjust Taylor rule to mimic an environment that has central bank inability (losses). Moreover, the current paper is aiming at investigating the effect of the new features of Taylor rule within a context of a New-Keynesian model on a developing economy. The current paper concludes that we can utilize Taylor rule within a New-Keynesian model to introduce the influence of the central bank inability on the economy. Central bank inability decreases both expected future real interest rate and expected future real output. On the contrary, it increases expected future nominal interest rate and expected future inflation rate. Moreover, we prove that the effect of central bank inability has larger effect on the expected inflation rate more than the influence of targeted inflation rate.     

Sectoral variability and the foundations of optimal inflation rate

The recent monetary search models argue that the real effects of inflation on economic activity can be gauged through relative price variability (RPV). Our study uses a large panel data of 32 developed and emerging European economies to test the relationship between inflation and RPV. We use a panel threshold model to explore the regime-specific effects of inflation on RPV. Our results confirm a non-linear profile of the relationship between inflation and RPV. Consistent with the monetary search models, our results show that the effects of inflation on the RPV are more significant in its low (below 0.792% per annum) and high (beyond 2.064% per annum) regimes. Finally, we also report a strong moderating role of central bank independence (CBI) in the inflation–RPV relationship.     

Political instability,political freedom and inflation

Using a dynamic panel data approach, we estimate the impact of the political and institutional factors on inflation. Estimation results show that a lower degree of political instability generates lower inflation only for developed and low-inflation countries. However, when political freedom is taken into account, political instability appears to be influential on inflation also for developing countries and turns out to be significant only for high-inflation countries. Such findings emphasize the inflation-reducing effects of political stability depending on democratic political structure.     

澳中中央银行独立性:比较与借鉴

澳大利亚中央银行经过几十年的改革和发展,其独立性已有很大进展,这一点已为学们的研究所证实。建立市场经济体制的中国迫切需要一个独立的中央银行,为此需借鉴包括澳大利亚在内的西方发达国家的经验,增强和完善中国中央银行的独立性。     

Central Bank independence: Low inflation at no cost? A numerical simulations exercise

The independent nature of the Central Bank is often associated with achieving low and stable inflation. Further to that the merits of independence are stretched to achieving low(er) output variability when compared to a government run monetary policy. In this paper we use the Alesina (1989) and Alesina and Gatti (1995) model to examine how often an Independent Central Bank can achieve an improvement on both counts. To do that we run numerical simulations where we change the ex ante probability of elections (and hence the degree of electoral uncertainty) with a view to determining how the private sector’s perceptions affect the level of output variability. Our conclusions agree with the Alesina and Gatti assertion that there will exist occasions when all political parties will be better off by consenting to the running of monetary policy by an independent institution but more often than not this comes at some cost to output. On theoretical grounds therefore, the trade-off between inflation and output variability (à la Rogoff) is still a valid one.     

Monetary control uncertainty and inflation bias

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the occurrence of an inflation bias with and without an output goal exceeding natural output. A monetary game model is developed from which an inflation bias emerges because the policymaker increases money growth in order to avoid a recession due to a possible negative control error. Whereas higher additive instrument uncertainty increases the inflation bias, higher multiplicative uncertainty decreases it. Delegating monetary policy to an independent and conservative central banker decreases the inflation bias for all types of control errors.     

Foreign bank participation and access to credit across firms in developing countries

Combining responses from a survey of firms operating in 35 developing and transition economies with data on the degree of foreign bank presence across these countries, we investigate whether higher foreign bank participation improves the accessibility of external financing for firms. The results suggest that all enterprises, including small and medium-sized ones, report facing lower financing obstacles in countries having higher levels of foreign bank presence. The results are robust to the inclusion of many controls and to econometric adjustments for the potential endogeneity of foreign bank presence and for the likely correlation of responses across firms within countries. Journal of Comparative Economics 34 (4) (2006) 774–795.     

货币政策透明度的趋势、制度安排和宏观经济环境

近年来,透明度已经成为货币政策主要的特征之一,提高货币政策的透明度正在演变为一个国际趋势。根据Geraats(2009)使用Dicer和Eichengreen(2009)收集的数据测算的E-G指数,发现世界范围内货币政策的透明度已经取得了显著提高,但实践中呈现出执行较高行政透明度和经济透明度,而实行较低程序透明度和政策透明度的变化趋势;同时,还讨论了与透明度变化趋势相适应的制度安排及宏观经济环境。     

The election cycle in the inflation bias: evidence from the G-7 countries

This paper derives and evaluates empirical implications which separate the naive voters view [Nordhaus, W.D., 1975. The political business cycle. Review of Economic Studies 42, 169–190.] from the rational-voters view [Barro R., Gordon, D., 1983. Rules, discretion, and reputation in a model of monetary policy. Journal of Monetary Economics 12, 101–121.] under rational expectations. The observational equivalence of the two approaches obtained under a natural rate vanishes as output persistence is introduced. An analysis of inflation in the G-7 countries reveals election patterns supporting the joint hypothesis that demand shocks persist and that monetary policy courts retrospective voters. Patterns turn weaker as central banks become more independent, but do not disappear. Reducing inflationary bias not only requires more central bank independence, but as well less persistence.     

Self-fulfilling Currency Crises and Central Bank Independence

We develop a model of a fixed exchange rate peg arrangement derived from the Barro–Gordon model of rules versus discretion. It is shown that the fixed peg is vulnerable to self-fulfilling currency crises in which the unemployment rate increases, the credibility of the rule decreases, but, paradoxically, the reputation of the policy-maker improves. Delegating monetary policy to an independent central banker does not prevent this type of crisis from arising, and can even make it more costly.
JEL Classification: F 3; F 4     

Formal targets, central bank independence and inflation dynamics in the UK: A Markov-Switching approach

We examine inflation and uncertainty in the UK with a version of the Markov Switching model, which allows for changes in the variance as well as in the mean and persistence of a series. We find that the UK’s attempts at exchange rate pegs in the form of shadowing the deutschmark and entering the ERM were ineffective, and in the latter case counterproductive in lowering inflation uncertainty. The 1981 budget, however, greatly lowered uncertainty, and the adoption of a formal inflation target also had a palpable, negative impact on inflation uncertainty. As a suggestive exercise, we examine inflation uncertainty in the US, and find that, over 2005–2008, in the absence of an inflation target, uncertainty rose in the US, while uncertainty remained low in the UK over this period of rising commodity prices and financial turmoil.     

ON CENTRAL BANK INDEPENDENCE, WAGE INDEXING AND A MONOPOLY UNION

The Rogoff proposition (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 100 (1985), pp. 1169–90) that it is socially optimal to delegate monetary policy to a central banker that is more inflation‐averse than society has been widely accepted and implemented in practice. However, there is a literature that argues that, if there is an inflation‐averse monopoly union in the economy, it is optimal to delegate monetary policy to an ‘ultra‐liberal’ central banker, i.e., a central banker that is interested only in output. In this paper, we examine whether introducing wage indexing into the latter models has any effect on the optimal degree of central bank conservativeness and find that, once a monopoly‐type labour union is introduced, wage indexing does not matter for the determination of the optimal degree of conservativeness of the monetary authority.     

Nonlinearity and stationarity of inflation rates: evidence from the euro-zone countries

Earlier studies hardly reject the hypothesis of a unit root in inflation. Few studies have examined the possibility of nonlinearity in inflation and tested nonlinear stationarity of the inflation rates. This study thus intends to fill the gap. This study utilizes the tests for nonlinearity along with the unit root tests that allow for nonlinearity in the variables to examine the stationarity of inflation rates of 12 European countries that formed the Euro Zone (EZ) later in the sample period. The results suggest that the majority of these countries’ inflation rates can be characterized by mean reversion during the floating exchange rate period. Many of them appear to be nonlinear stationary. This finding is essential in conducting applied economic studies for these countries, when constructing models whose validity relies on whether or not inflation is stationary. The results of this study also imply that shocks to inflation have a transitory effect on inflation in the euro area. Therefore, it would be less costly in exercising the policies of disinflation for the monetary authorities of the euro area than for those of the countries with nonstationary inflation.