Changing Central Bank Transparency in Central and Eastern Europe During the Financial Crisis

There is ample empirical evidence in the literature for the positive effect of central bank transparency on the economy. The main channel is that transparency reduces the uncertainty regarding future monetary policy and thereby it helps agents to make better investment and saving decisions. In this chapter, we document how the degree of transparency of central banks in Central and Eastern Europe has changed during periods of financial stress, and we argue that during the recent financial crisis central banks became less transparent. We investigate also how these changes affected the uncertainty in these economies, measured by the degree of disagreement across professional forecasters over the future short- and long-term interest rates and also by their forecast accuracy.