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6 - How central bankers use their independence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2013

Christopher Adolph
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Summary

Bernard WOOLLEY, Principal Private Secretary to the Minister for Administrative Affairs: That's how the civil service works in practice – each department is controlled by the people it's supposed to be controlling. … Every department acts for the powerful sectional interest with whom they have a permanent relationship.

Jim HACKER, Minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs: So the whole system is designed to stop the cabinet from carrying out its policies?

WOOLLEY: Well, somebody's got to.

HACKER: But shouldn't the civil service be committed to helping the government carry out its wishes?

WOOLLEY: So it is, as long as the government's wishes are practical.

HACKER: Meaning?

WOOLLEY: As long as the civil service agrees with them.

“THE BED OF NAILS,” Yes Minister

THE CAREER THERORY of central banker motivations lets us revisit old questions and gain new insights. An important example is the debate among Iversen (1999), Hall and Franzese (1998), and Cukierman and Lippi (1999), who explore the interactive effects of central banks and labor unions on economic performance. This intriguing literature emerged from the insight that if unions have any wage-setting power, then central bankers have the ability to shape the real economy using monetary policy, even over the long run. Yet to date, this work lacks any way to measure a concept at its theoretical core: the conservatism of the central bank. In this chapter, I combine measures of central bank autonomy and conservatism into a new measure of overall central bank nonaccommodation.

Type
Chapter
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Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics
The Myth of Neutrality
, pp. 182 - 204
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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