در داخل و خارج از بانک مرکزی : استقلال و مسئولیت پذیری در نظارت مالی: روندها و عوامل مؤثر

This paper analyzes recent trends in, and determinants of, financial supervisory governance inside and outside central banks. We first review the case for supervisory independence and accountability in order to frame the econometric work on their determinants. We then calculate the levels of supervisory independence and accountability in 55 countries, disentangling similarities and differences among central banks and pure financial supervisors. The empirical analysis of the determinants indicates that the quality of public sector governance plays a decisive role in establishing accountability arrangements, more than independence arrangements. It also shows that decisions regarding levels of independence and accountability are not well-connected. The results also show that the likelihood for establishing governance arrangements suitable for supervision is higher when the supervisor is located outside the central bank.

The world of financial sector supervision has been under reconstruction for over a decade. Attention for the institutional architecture of supervision (inside central bank, outside central bank, sector-specific agencies or integrated agencies) is increasingly being accompanied by interest in the governance of these agencies, with a special focus on their independence and accountability. The attention to governance is a new phenomenon. While an entirely new strand of literature emerged in the 1980s and 1990s on central bank independence (CBI), or to be more precise, on the independence of the central bank's monetary policy function, no such attention went to the supervisory function. Somehow, it was assumed in the literature that, for those central banks that also performed supervisory functions, the independence in monetary policy spilled over into the supervisory functions. It is no exaggeration to state that almost no attention went to the governance of those supervisory agencies that were not attached to the central bank — as was the case in a great number of European countries. The discussions that surrounded the establishment of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the United Kingdom and the Australian Prudential Regulations Authority (APRA) in Australia in the second half of the 1990s were the first ones that explicitly mentioned independence and accountability issues. Around the same time, some academics — Lastra (1996) and Goodhart (1998) — raised the issue of financial supervisory independence as a principle. Likewise, some practitioners claimed that the lack of supervisory independence was one of the contributing factors of the crises that had occurred (De Krivoy, 2000 on the Venezuelan crisis, for instance). The Basel Core Principle for Effective Bank Supervision — Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (1997) and then Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2006) — gave the principle of supervisory independence official backing. As argued in Das and Quintyn (2002) and Quintyn (2007), attention for governance arrangements for supervisors is urgently needed because the job content of supervisors has been changing dramatically in response to the worldwide liberalization of financial sectors. Supervisors used to be compliance officers, checking if banks complied with various economic rules and regulations. Nowadays, supervisors are “governance supervisors” who have to monitor on behalf of the debt holders of the financial institutions the quality of the institutions' governance arrangements. Quintyn (2007) shows that good regulatory governance (governance of financial supervisors) is a precondition to implement this task successfully. In recent years, a number of papers — Quintyn and Taylor, 2003 and Quintyn and Taylor, 2007, Hüpkes et al. (2005) — have built the case for independence and accountability for supervisory agencies and spelled out the operational implications. However, given that the governance arrangements adopted in reformed or newly established agencies are inevitably the result of a political decision-making process, this paper takes a political economy view with respect to the emerging trends in supervisory independence and accountability. Recognizing that the political decision-making processes with respect to the institutional structure of supervision and their governance structure are not independent from one another, this paper builds upon two approaches recently developed in the literature. One is the analysis in trends of supervisory governance based on the construction of indices for independence and accountability — mimicking the successful line of research with regard to central bank independence — as pioneered in Quintyn et al. (2007). The other one is the analysis of the determinants of the newly emerging supervisory structures, developed by Masciandaro, 2006, Masciandaro, 2007 and Masciandaro, in press. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 links the discussion about independence and accountability of financial supervisors with the CBI literature. Section 3 discusses current trends in independence and accountability of supervisors based on the indices computed in this paper. Section 4 presents the econometric analysis of the determinants and Section 5 brings together the conclusions, as well as suggestions for further research.

Unlike the monetary policy function, which is nowadays invariably the core function of a central bank, the supervisory function is being performed by a variety of institutions for whom there is less consensus about the governance model than for central banks as monetary policy agents. This paper analyzes empirically recent trends in, and determinants of, financial supervisory governance. It does this on the basis of a model which frames the politicians' preferences for supervisory governance arrangements. The empirical analysis of the determinants of emerging independence and accountability arrangements (based on indices of independence and accountability) indicates that the quality of public sector governance plays a decisive role in establishing accountability arrangements, more than independence arrangements. The results also show that the likelihood for establishing governance arrangements suitable for the supervisory task seems to be higher when the supervisor is located outside the central bank. While further research on this topic is needed, given that it is new and broadly uncharted territory, two lessons are surfacing. First, that policymakers who now tend to lean mostly towards strong accountability for their financial sector supervisors — which is justified in light of their broad mandate — should evaluate independence and accountability as two sides of the same coin. And secondly, that central banks that are also supervisors, may wish to accommodate this trend by revisiting some of their governance arrangements and diversify them to meet the requirements posed by financial sector supervision.