Tag: finance

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The governance of central banks and monetary policy committees: are they too narrowly constructed?

A modern central bank usually relies on ‘monetary policy committees’ or MPCs (albeit with different names, such as boards and councils) that play a pivotal role in the conduct of monetary policy. The collective deliberations of the MPCs are held regularly throughout the year and are geared towards recommendations (either by vote or consensus) on the setting of the policy rate.

The core principle is that the practice of monetary policy – and hence the role of the MPCs – should be free of political pressure. Central banks should be accountable but have operational independence in pursuit of their primary goal of maintaining price stability.

The size of the MPCs and the decision-making structure varies across countries and regions as shown below (Table 1). The MPCs are dominated by internal bank staff and economists, and, in some cases, with representatives from the corporate world. There are also cases in which there are no external members. There is no scope for representatives of workers and employers and representatives from civil society to be part of the membership of MPCs.  

Table 1: Composition of MPCs, selected central banks

Source: https://rbareview.gov.au/sites/rbareview.gov.au/files/2023-04/rbareview-paper-gai.pdf

The degree of gender parity is low in a typical MPC. India is a conspicuous example – see Exhibit 1. Would improving gender parity improve the quality of monetary policy as measured in terms of maintaining price stability? Research findings on this are ambivalent, but the aim is to use an august institution to promote gender equality which is a core element of the global development agenda.

Exhibit 1: Where have all the women gone? The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India meets with members of the MPC

Despite the restrictions placed on central banks that restrain them from broad-based community-level engagement, these entities have tried to overcome such restraints by a transparent communications strategy in which deliberations of MPCs are made public. Furthermore, in recent years central banks have moved away from a preoccupation with price and financial stability. One important example of this trend is a new form of engagement via international cooperation among central banks, most notably supporting climate action as a key aspect of monetary policy. This is best illustrated by the ‘Network for Greening the Financial System’ (NGFS) which now has 134 members.

Financial inclusion is another way in which central banks are changing their engagement with workers and employers and the broader community. As is well known, the aim of financial inclusion is to incorporate the unbanked segment of the population – which can be quite large in developing countries – into the formal financial system. A 2024 meta-analytical assessment shows that ‘…financial inclusion outcomes reflect small, positive and statistically significant average effects on consumption, income, asset and other poverty-related indicators. Given this finding, it is noteworthy to point out that the ‘Alliance for Financial Inclusion’ reports that there are now 84 central banks across the world that have formally integrated financial inclusion in their mandates.

Financial inclusion creates synergies between monetary policy and poverty reduction strategies as well as the agenda of transition to formality. Central banks have discovered that financial inclusion, by encouraging formalization, improves the monetary transmission mechanism and thus strengthens the effectiveness of monetary policy. This in turn creates the space for workers and employers as well as civil society at the domestic level to engage with monetary authorities in areas that go beyond price stability.

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Counting the missing billions: taking care when reporting on money laundering

In reporting on financial and economic statistics, it is important to distinguish between stocks and flows as well relative and absolute numbers. Stocks (accumulated value of a variable over a given period) typically catches public attention in a way that annualised data usually do not. Similarly, relative figures usually turn out to be a lot more modest than absolute numbers.  I will illustrate these points by drawing on the Bangladesh experience.

In Bangladesh, media reports conflate typically stocks and flows. The currently popular citation is that US$ 150 billion has been siphoned off to various overseas havens by politically connected individuals over the last 15 years. Some media reports proceed to express stock estimates of money laundering as a proportion of flow data (annual GDP).  This can befuddle the lay reader.

The task of tracking money laundering falls on the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU).  I suspect, it is a small, under-resourced unit within the Bangladesh Bank (the best talent and resources probably go to units dealing with monetary policy). This does not make BFIU estimates less reliable than other estimates, but alternative estimates of annual rates of money laundering do exist and they ought to be acknowledged in public discourse. Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) in the recent past has come up with an annualised figure of USD 3 billion, while the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity Institute (GFI) reported annualised figures of USD 8.7 billion. They note that most money laundering activities occur through trade mis-invoicing. One should not also overlook the use of the humble, but time-honoured, Hundi, as a source of money laundering. The bank heist by one of Bangladesh’s richest men is sensational but not a very common source of money laundering.

I personally prefer the use of annualised figure because they are easy to compare over time and across countries. Also, stock estimates can be made to assume astronomical magnitudes. For example, I understand that some Bangladeshi economists have come up with a stock estimate of money laundering for the 1972-2022 period. This understandably dwarfs the size of money laundering that are being reported now.

There is the issue of relative vs absolute numbers. Annualised data on money laundering can be expressed as a proportion of a country’s GDP. This is what the UN does. Another advantage is that this relative number offers an indication of the potential output loss from money laundering. In the case Bangladesh, a back-of-the envelope estimate (which is based on the annualised estimate of USD150 billion) suggests that it is 3.2% of GDP. The global norm ranges between 2-5% of GDP.

Has the incidence of money laundering has gotten worse over time? Here, the changes in country-specific ranking anchored in an ‘anti-money laundering index’ for 152 countries by a Swiss organisation, can be useful (1= worst, 152= best). BD ranked 82 in 2017, but then fell below 40 in later years before recovering to 46 in 2023. Why this has happened merits further investigation.

Finally, it is worth noting that, however measured, money laundering represents massive waste of resources enriching some at the expense of poorer nations. To be resolved, it needs global cooperation. Why is it that Singapore and London, for example, allow themselves to become havens for laundered funds? Indeed, London has been described as …’the main nerve centre of the darker global offshore system that hides and guards the world’s stolen wealth’. If the authorities there camp down on such havens (which they can), the incentive to park illicit funds abroad by crooks and criminals from developing countries will be significantly diminished.

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