The Foundations

Abstract

The design of the European Central Bank (ECB) reflected a decades-long evolution of academic thinking and real-world experience concerning the optimal practice of central banking. In this chapter, we aim to unpack these influences and explain how they motivated both the drafters of the ECB’s statute and the economists in the national central banks who set the ECB up. We concentrate on the ideas that were dominant at the turn of the last century and the principles that were seen to constitute ‘good’ monetary governance, including the notion that monetary policy should focus primarily on price stability. We show how these principles were not only echoed in the EU Treaty, but also ‘hard-coded’ into the policy framework that, by the second half of the 1990s, had come to prominence in academic and policy circles: inflation targeting and its counterpart in econometrics, the New Keynesian model.