Central Bank transparency and inflation targeting: A policy performance analysis for Turkey

In the wake of recent global financial crisis, growing emphasis has been put on central bank reliability and transparency, especially for the developing countries. In our paper, we built a macroeconomic model to test the impact of central bank reliability on the inflation targeting performance by the bank. To this end, we utilized the indexes developed by Cukierman et.al.(1993); and Dinçer and Eigenberg (2013) to calculate a measure of Turkish Central Bank reliability for the past two decades, and ran a multi-equation time series regression to analyze the effect of institutional independence and transparency on inflation targeting performance, while controlling for other macroeconomic indicators that impact inflation. We found that higher degrees of perceived transparency of the central bank has a positive effect on the inflation targeting performance. Also, transparency seems to be a better proxy for the overall institutional change the Turkish economy experienced in the last two decades.

___

  • Bernanke, B. S., Laubach, T., Mishkin, F. S., & Posen, A. S. (1999). Inflation targeting. Princenton University Press.
  • Bernanke, B. S. (2010, May). Central bank independence, transparency, and accountability. In Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies International Conference, Bank of Japan, Tokyo (Vol. 25).
  • Blinder, A. S. (1999). Central banking in theory and practice. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
  • Crowe, C., & Meade, E. E. (2008). Central bank independence and transparency: Evolution and effectiveness. European Journal of Political Economy, 24(4), 763-777.
  • Cukierman, A., Webb, S. B., & Neyapti, B. (1992). Measuring the Independence of Central Banks and Its Effect on Policy Outcomes. The World Bank Economic Review, 353-398.
  • Dincer, N. Nergiz, and Barry Eichengreen. "Central Bank Transparency and Independence: Updates and New Measures." International Journal of Central Banking 10, no. 1 (2014): 189-259.
  • Erçel, G. (1999). Disinflation program for the year 2000: Implementation of exchange rate and monetary policy. TCMB.
  • Fisher, I. (2006). Purchasing power of money: Its determination and relation to credit interest and crises, Cosimo, Inc.
  • Friedman, M., & Schwartz, A. J. (2008). A monetary history of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton University Press.
  • Grauwe, P. D., & Polan, M. (2005). Is inflation always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon? The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 107(2), 239-259.