One hundred and thirty years of central bank cooperation: a BIS perspective

Claudio Borio and Gianni Toniolo

No 197, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: With the insight of 130 years of history, this paper tries to answer three questions: how did changing international monetary and financial conditions shape the targets and tools of central bank cooperation? What factors influenced its intensity? Did a structured organisation, such as the BIS, make a difference to its effectiveness? We show that while central bank cooperation through history was ultimately directed to ensuring monetary and financial stability, the conception of these objectives, the relationship between the two, the balance in their pursuit, and the strategies followed evolved over time reflecting changes in the monetary and financial environment as well as in the intellectual climate. In turn, the intensity of central bank cooperation was influenced by the state of international relations, the prestige and degree of autonomy of central banks and the technical nature of the issues requiring cooperation. We also argue that the BIS made a material difference, at least when conditions allowed.

Keywords: cooperation; Bank for International Settlements; gold standard; Bretton Woods; monetary and financial stability; central bank (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E50 F02 N10 N20 N40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2006-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bis.org/publ/work197.pdf Full PDF document (application/pdf)
http://www.bis.org/publ/work197.htm (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bis:biswps:197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin Fessler ().