The first twenty years of the European Central Bank offer a unique insight into how a central bank can navigate macroeconomic insecurity and crisis. This volume examines the structures and decision-making processes behind the complex measures taken by the ECB to tackle some of the toughest economic challenges in the history of modern Europe.

Europe has a rich monetary history. Until recently, its many central banks assigned divergent priorities and pursued policy objectives via different routes. As a result, Europe's past provides fertile ground for those seeking practical guidance to the art ofcentral banking. The importance of this past gained a new dimension with the prospect of Economic and Monetary Union in 1999, as the participating countries were faced with the challenge of bridging their differences and forging a common monetary policy strategy that would apply throughout the new currency area. At the same time, these countries sought to build forth on the theretofore most successful central bank strategies, thereby maintaining a certain degree of policy continuity. Monetary policy strategy is at the core of central banking. This strategy determines how incoming information on economic developments is translated into monetary policy actions and how these policy actions are communicated to the public at large. In other words, the strategy fulfils the dual role ofimposing a structure on the internal policy-making process and ofproviding a vehicle for the external communication of this process. The design of a monetary policy strategy thus brings together key elements such as consistency and transparency - that together determine the effectiveness and credibility ofmonetary policy.

This timely volume presents the latest thinking on the monetary policy rules and seeks to determine just what types of rules and policy guidelines function best. A unique cooperative research effort that allowed contributors to evaluate different policy rules using their own specific approaches, this collection presents their striking findings on the potential response of interest rates to an array of variables, including alterations in the rates of inflation, unemployment, and exchange. Monetary Policy Rules illustrates that simple policy rules are more robust and more efficient than complex rules with multiple variables. A state-of-the-art appraisal of the fundamental issues facing the Federal Reserve Board and other central banks, Monetary Policy Rules is essential reading for economic analysts and policymakers alike.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

The Evolution of Monetary Policy Strategies in Europe provides a comprehensive review of the advances in European monetary policy-making over the past decades. This book examines the considerations that determine a central bank's monetary strategy and explains how these considerations have featured in recent European monetary history. In so doing, it establishes what European monetary policy-makers have learned (or should have learned) and how they learned it. At the same time, Aerdt Houben maps out the rich monetary traditions that now flow together in the new-born Eurosystem and provides important insight into a prime influence on the system's decision-making, that is, the participating countries' past experiences. The book's distinctiveness lies in its sweeping coverage of policy developments in the individual central banks of the European Union, its penetrating analysis of the country-specific learning curves and its balanced assessment of the viability of alternative monetary policy strategies, including the strategy recently adopted by the Eurosystem. It combines theoretical insights with an in-depth empirical study of monetary policy design in Europe, highlighting the specific features that have contributed to policy success or failure. While the subject of monetary policy strategy (especially that of the Eurosystem) is currently very topical, the book's detailed information on how monetary policy has actually been implemented in each of the 15 European Union countries makes it a useful reference work with a long life-span.

Comprehensive 200-page overview of the ECB from its inception in June 1998 until the present day.

David Howarth and Peter Loedel provide a theoretically inspired account of the creation, design and operation of the European Central Bank. Issues explored include the theoretical approaches to the ECB, the antecedents of European monetary authority, the different national perspectives on central bank independence, the complex organisation of the bank, the issues of accountability and the difficult first years of the ECB in operation.