While most Central Banks in Europe, and elsewhere, have been giving priority to the achievement of price stability for more than a decade, in recent years this has been reinforced by a marked trend towards giving Central Banks much more autonomy to pursue this goal. Both the objective of achieving price stability and such autonomy have, in a sizeable number of countries now been constitutionally incorporated in newly revised legislation. In countries where no such legislation has been enacted, such as UK and Australia, proposals to do so remain very much on the present political agenda.
Such legislative moves towards greater autonomy ("independence") have been so widespread and rapid that we thought it worthwhile to try to document the present position. We shall concentrate mostly on developments in Europe, since this is the region with which we are most familiar, but we shall also refer to similar progress in the Antipodes and Canada. The same trend towards the enactment of legislation for greater Central Bank autonomy is also evident in a number of South American countries, such as Chile and Mexico.
