By Jonathan Lepper, formerly of the Secretariat to the House of Commons Treasury Committee and Gabriel Sterne of the Bank's International Economic Analysis Division.
This article reviews the parliamentary scrutiny of central banks in 14 countries using the results from a new survey. There is wide variation in the nature of parliamentary scrutiny within the sample. There is no firm evidence in these data, however, to suggest that particular types of framework are associated with different overall levels of parliamentary scrutiny. The Bank of Japan, Bank of England, European Central Bank (ECB) and Federal Reserve each make higher-than-average appearances before their respective parliaments to discuss monetary policy issues, and the technical support provided to the relevant committees is relatively high in the US Congress and in the European Parliament. The level of scrutiny can be circumstance specific, and some inflation-targeting frameworks have defined specific conditions that would trigger scrutiny and the form it would take.
Parliamentary scrutiny of central banks in the United Kingdom and overseas