With central banks looming larger in the public consciousness in the wake of the great recession of 2008, perhaps more attention than ever is being paid to central banks and their activities. So far as I am aware, this Encyclopedia breaks new ground in being the first devoted exclusively to central banking, defined in the book’s introduction as “the variety of policy targets, strategies and instruments used by monetary authorities all around the world”. The Encyclopedia does not eschew, though, pertinent theories and concepts. It succeeds in its aim of being “a voluminous, but synthetic work”.
The alphabetically arranged 244 articles written by 154 contributors deal with a wide range of relevant topics including theories (e.g. Gresham’s Law), practices (e.g. Quantitative Easing), concepts (e.g. Financial Bubble), people (e.g. Alan Greenspan), laws (e.g. the Glass-Steagall Act) and institutions (e.g. the European Central Bank). The authors are mostly at academic institutions with a handful currently working for central banks. The Encyclopedia is written with a keen eye to the 2008 recession and its possible lessons. The articles vary somewhat in length but not by very much, being about two pages each. They are notably well done: sophisticated and very informative without wasting words. The articles often provide the views of different – even including so-called “heterodox” – economic schools of thought on the subject. For example, the article on Free Banking cites the views of the Austrian School, the Banking School and the New Monetary Economics. Sometimes the authors forthrightly express their own opinions. For example, in the article on the euro-area crisis, the author writes, “(O)n the whole, the euro-area crisis shows that a single monetary policy for a structurally and economically different series of countries does not work properly […]”. Each article has references – sometimes quite a few – listed at the end and cross-references to other articles in the Encyclopedia. While well-written and rich in content, there is a major, and surprising, flaw in that there is no index (only the print edition is being reviewed; there is an electronic version as well).
The audience likely to benefit most from The Encyclopedia of Central Banking is one with some economic knowledge but without deep familiarity of central banking or monetary theory, for example undergraduate economics and finance students. Those with little economic knowledge will find many of the articles difficult to understand. This work is likely most useful for college and bank libraries.
