ارتباطات بانک مرکزی در سیاست های مالی

The issue of central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received very little attention in the literature. This article aims to shed light on the determinants of central bank communication on fiscal policy by analysing the intensity of central banks’ fiscal communication for five central banks (the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank) over the period 1999–2011. The ECB communicates intensively on fiscal policies, in a normative way. The other central banks emphasise foreign fiscal developments, fiscal policy as input to forecasts, or the use of government debt instruments in monetary policy operations. The empirical analysis indicates that the financial crisis has overall increased the intensity of central bank communication on fiscal policy. The evolution of the government deficit ratio is a driver of the intensity of fiscal communication in the euro area, the US and Japan, and for Sweden since the start of the crisis, while in the UK its intensity is related to government debt developments as of the start of the crisis.

A perhaps not much advertised side-effect of the financial crisis is that central bankers increasingly – and more publicly – communicate on fiscal policy developments and perspectives. Such communication, which may occur for a variety of reasons, takes place amidst the acknowledged importance for central bankers to be clearer and more transparent about their policy decisions and underpinning analysis. While the established literature on central bank communication traditionally deals with communication of monetary policy messages to the general public and financial markets,2 the more specific issue of central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received very little attention.3 Yet, given the numerous ways in which fiscal policy affects the environment in which monetary policy operates, the question arises what fiscal policy aspects enter into a central bank's main communication channel of monetary policy, and whether public finance issues have gathered more attention recently. This article aims to shed light on these questions by empirically reviewing the intensity of central banks' communication on fiscal policy for a set of five central banks (the US Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank). Our findings indicate that the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank devote about 2 to 4% of their main monetary policy communication outlet to fiscal issues, mostly describing recent fiscal developments and outlook. On average the ECB devotes around 12% of its introductory statements to fiscal issues, and for the larger part ECB's communication on fiscal policy is of a normative nature. Government deficits are identified as a main driver of the intensity of fiscal communication in the US, the euro area and Japan. Since the onset of the financial crisis developments in public finances have become a driver of fiscal communication also for the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank. The remainder of this article is organised as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the main channels through which fiscal policy affects the short to longer-term environment for monetary policy. Section 3 recalls the importance of central banks' external communication. Section 4 sketches out our developed indicator for central bank communication on fiscal policy and carries out an empirical analysis of its intensity over the period 1999–2011. Concluding remarks are offered in Section 5.

This article sheds light on the role of fiscal policy in central bank communication, a topic that thus far has received very little attention in economic research. Questions included are: how much central banks openly communicate on fiscal policy, on which aspects do their fiscal communications focus and has this changed with the financial crisis. To this purpose, we developed a fiscal communication indicator for five central banks based on their main official monetary policy publication that includes information on the monetary policy deliberations, using a combination of both objective guidelines and more subjective assessment. Our analysis indicates that the ECB communicates intensively on fiscal policy. Moreover, while other central banks tend to be largely descriptive when referring to domestic and foreign fiscal policy developments and perspectives, ECB statements are largely normative in nature. Empirically analysing developments in fiscal communication between 1999 and 2011, we find some evidence that the part devoted to fiscal developments increases in case of higher government deficits in the US, the euro area and Japan, while in the UK and Sweden such effects are visible as of the start of the financial crisis for the debt and deficit ratio respectively. These results are fairly robust to alternative specifications such as using the absolute number of words devoted to fiscal policy rather than its share in the total number of words used in the main monetary policy communication device. This study is – to our knowledge – the first one to quantify fiscal statements of central banks. Further work in this area could focus on enlarging the number of central banks covered; increasing the sample further would for instance allow for analysing the role of institutional factors in explaining differences in the role of fiscal policy in central bank communication. Using real-time fiscal data could be used in econometrical analysis to better capture central bankers' concerns about fiscal developments, just as using more sophisticated fiscal indicators.