Independence and Transmission of Monetary Policy in Small Open Economies: The Case of Canada and the Czech Republic

The question of whether a small open economy (SOE) with highly integrated financial markets can shield itself from the influence of foreign monetary policy and preserve its monetary independence has been the subject of extensive research over the last decades. The growing integration of world economies owing to globalization, the impacts of recent global pandemic on them leading to the use of unconventional monetary policies, and the consequent high levels of inflation across the globe have highlighted the importance of further study of this problematic. This thesis focuses on two small open economies from different currency areas, Canada and the Czech Republic, and evaluates the monetary policies of their central banks, concentrating primarily on their independence, secondarily on the transmission mechanism of the respective policies, and also on their foreign exchange reserves. A comparative analysis of these two countries and their monetary policies on such scale and complexity has not yet been made before. The results of cointegration testing of vector autoregression models consisting of three-month interbank interest rates representing the monetary policies of the countries under investigation revealed that both Canada and the Czech Republic exhibited a considerable degree of monetary..