Transparency, Communication and Accountability in The Central Bank of Iran

In recent years, central banks worldwide focused more on transparency, communications and accountability. This behavior is contrary to the previous policy by central bankers that made their decisions under the closed doors. Now a days, minutes of meeting by monetary policy committee which is the most important decision making body in central banks publicized by monetary authority. Besides that, accountability is accepted by central banks and communication become part of any central bankers.Central bank independence is corresponds with accountability and transparency and they obliged to explain their activities regarding economic problems and their actions. In terms of economic literature on these subjects, there has been many articles and studies since 1990s and economists argue that the management of expectation is an important part of monetary policy to curb inflation and it depends on the communication, transparency and accountability of central banks.Central Bank of Iran since it inception in 50 years ago like many others central banks facing a dilemma on how to deal with government interventionist policy in order to achieve price stability. There has been many challenges by central bank of Iran during the oil price booms and dooms. Hyper-inflation in both cases were the result of fiscal policy dominance over monetary policy.Independence of central banks was undermined by repeated changes of central bank governors and dominance of money and credit council (MCC) by members of cabinet ministries. In addition, transparency and communication of central bank of Iran has been diminished by delays on release of information and parallel institutes and ministries for data gathering and processing that sometimes publish different figures on economy.We intend to investigate the performance of central bank of Iran in this regard and make suggestions on how to make central bank more independence and accountable for its monetary policy decisions.