Montenegrin Journal of Economics (Jun 2018)

http://www.mnje.com/sites/mnje.com/files/041-057_-piplica_et_al.pdf

  • Damir Piplica,
  • Ivo Speranda,
  • Zvonimir Josip Perkovic

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14254/1800-5845/2018.14-2.3
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 2
pp. 41 – 57

Abstract

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Although the countries of Southeast Europe are connected in many ways, there are a lot differences among them with reference to development of the market economy, and especially in the way of conducting of the monetary policy and achieving of the price stability. The subject of this article's research is the actual central bank independence and its impact on monetary stability in the specific environment of Southeast European countries. Therefore, we applied it TOR as a research method because shorter average duration of the mandate of a central bank governor can be an obstacle for conducting of the monetary policy in the long run, as in such a case central bank would be less interested in obtaining its primary goal – keeping of monetary stability. The main hypothesis in this study is that there was a significant influence of the actual central bank independence to monetary stability, regardless of different implementations of the monetary policies of the central banks of the observed countries. We have used statistical methods to prove the hypotheses and then we gave an adequate explanation of the research results. The result of our research has shown that in the period 2000-2016, despite their differences, actual independence of the respective central banks was strengthening, while the inflation rate in the countries of the Southeast Europe was decreasing, but the connection between the two was weak. However, we have established that in the Southeast European countries in the end relatively higher degree of the actual independence of their central banks has been obtained, as well as lower inflation rate in 2016, while their negative correlation has become very strong. The observed countries can have obtained their monetary stability greatly thanks to the higher degree of the actual independence of their respective central banks, but at the same the independence by itself is not enough to keep the inflation rate at the desired rate, like the one requested by Maastricht's criteria. In modern circumstances lower inflation rate can depend on some other factors, such as political lobbies, mutual adjustment of fiscal and monetary policies, imperfection of the labour market, national culture of the inflation, etc

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