Central bank independence: An update

Central bank independence (CBI) refers to the absence of influence of politicians on monetary policy making. Since we wrote our first surveys of the literature on central bank independence (Eijffinger and de Haan, 1996 and Berger et al., 2001), a lot has changed. The level of CBI has increased considerably in almost all countries, also more recently. According to Romelli (2024), following a slowdown in central bank law reforms between 2010 and 2015, after 2016 reforms led to further increases in independence in 35 cases, while it declined in only 7 cases. However, Garriga (2025) argues that although there is a global tendency towards more CBI, there is significant variance across and within regions, including numerous reforms reducing CBI in the past two decades.