Political Pressure on Central Banks: The Case of the Czech National Bank

As the independence of national central banks in the European Union is one of the main institutional features of the monetary constitution of the EU, the paper tries to find out whether central banks are factually independent in their decisions about interest rates if they face political pressure. The Havrilesky (1993) methodology of the political pressure on central banks is applied to the Czech National Bank, a central bank of one of the new EU Member States, in order to test whether the conducted monetary policy has been influenced by political pressure from various interest groups.