Quest for the Best: How to Measure Central Bank Independence and Show its Relationship with Inflation

Abstract

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 easier 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.

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