抄録
The new Bank of Japan Law, passed in the Upper House plenary session on June 11, 1997, and became effective in April 1998. It is the first revision in over half a century of the BOJ Law of 1942, which has relegated the central bank to government control. The new law strengthens the central bank's autonomy and provides for greater transparency. This paper examines the background to the revision, the significant points of the revision, and unresolved issues. The autonomy is the quite unique problem of the Public Choice. Also, in light of the new law's emphasis on autonomy, we apply a “central bank independence index” to evaluate the law's impact.
As a result, BOJ got the greater legal independence, when we use the same method to evaluate the new BOJ Law as Cukierman's method, the index rose 0.37 from 0.18 due to improved policy objectives.
That result was supported if we used Gllili's method. However many pending issues depend on actual operations. Especially banking supervision is the biggest issues in the point of the efficiency of the Central banks and many banks.
