Central Bank Independence and Inflation in Transition Economies: A Comparative Meta-Analysis with Developed and Developing Economies

This paper aims to evaluate the central bank reforms in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries through a comparative meta-analysis between studies of transition economies and those of other developed and developing economies that empirically examined the effect of central bank independence (CBI) on inflation. The results of a meta-synthesis using a total of 282 estimates collected from existing literature indicates that both transition and non-transition studies have successfully identified a negative relationship between CBI and inflation. Moreover, our meta-regression analysis suggested that the choice of estimator, inflation variable type, degree of freedom, and quality level of the study strongly affected the empirical results concerning transition economies. We also found that no significant difference exists between the two types of studies in terms of both effect size and statistical significance so long as we control for the degree of freedom and quality level of the study, implying that the socioeconomic setting of the society has so substantially developed in transition economies that the relation between CBI and its disinflation effect is observed in the same way as in non-transition economies.28, [15] p