Studie von Transparency International, 28.3.2017 (engl. Originalfassung)
Because political inertia has to date prevented the establishment of a sustainable institutional architecture for the Eurozone, the ECB’s role in safeguarding the euro is as indispensable as ever. The ECB emerged as the decisive actor in the euro crisis, with an extraordinary degree of latitude thanks to the statutory independence enshrined in the EU treaties: Governing Council members may not seek or take instructions from member state governments or European authorities to protect it from political interference. At the same time the ECB faces a significant decline in public trust, which alongside its expanded responsibilities put considerable strain on its accountability.
The relationship between the ECB’s independence, its mandate, and its accountability lies at the heart of this report. This arrangement is intended to ensure the legitimacy of a body that has deliberately been placed outside of democratic politics. Given its independence, the ECB’s accountability consists of answerability rather than democratic control: The President and the Chair of the Supervisory Board must report to the European Parliament and to the Council. Yet the extraordinary measures taken by the ECB since 2008 have tested the ECB’s mandate to breaking point, raising the question if its accountability framework is well adapted to this new era of highly interventionist central bank policies.
If independence is one side of the coin, the flipside is a narrow mandate. Following the example of the German Bundesbank, the Maastricht Treaty enshrined the principle of central bank independence and an unambiguous price stability mandate in EU constitutional law. Only if doing so does not interfere with price stability may the ECB also “support the general economic policies in the Union.” With the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism in late 2014, the ECB now also has the objective to contribute “to the safety and soundness of credit institutions and the stability of the financial system.”
The first decade after the creation of the euro in 1999 was plain sailing for the ECB, and the robustness of this institutional arrangement was hardly tested. That changed radically in 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers plunged the world into a global financial crisis. In the euro area, where it led to mutually reinforcing banking and sovereign debt crises, the ECB emerged as the dominant force in European economic governance. [...]
This leads to two fundamental concerns: central banks have been overburdened, and this is putting a severe strain on the institutional arrangement that underpins the ECB’s partial exemption from the principle of democratic accountability.
Den vollständigen Bericht finden Sie hier (pdf).