Path-dependent independence: the Central Bank of Russia in the 1990s

Abstract

"Independent central banks, because of their purported ability to restrain government officials from manipulating their economies in pursuit of short-term political goals, have been championed by scholars and policy makers alike as guarantors of macroeconomic stability for emerging post-communist democracies. However, Russia's experience in the 1990s calls this argument into question. Although the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) was able to develop a significant degree of freedom from political interference during its early years, its monetary policies at that time were anything but conservative and anti-inflationary. Then, when the CBR's political autonomy began to erode after mid-1993 while its technical capabilities improved, its increasingly monetarist actions began to appear more typical of an "independent" central bank and inflation receded accordingly. This should lead us to rethink our theories on central bank independence - both how we define independence and what we can and cannot expect of an independent central bank. Given the CBR's continuity of personnel, historical objectives, and technical capabilities, even a politically autonomous CBR can not have been expected to internalize and implement new policy goals overnight." [author's abstract]