CNB wins international award for transparency

The Czech National Bank has won the prestigious Central Banking Transparency Award 2022 (external link). The award has been bestowed to the CNB for its open and easy-to-understand communication with stakeholders and for its commitment to further increasing its transparency by Central Banking, which has been providing central banking news for more than 25 years.

The Central Banking Awards this year recognised outstanding performances in the area of central banking for the ninth year. In their decision on the winner of the transparency award, the jurors highlighted the CNB’s work in communicating monetary policy, which has taken its already impressive commitment to transparency to a new level. The jury also noted the CNB’s progress in increasing the clarity and accessibility of its communication with stakeholders, especially via social media channels.

In 2020, the CNB moved from anonymised minutes to publishing attributed minutes of its monetary policy meetings, which provide details of the arguments and ascribe them to the respective board members. This was followed last year by the launch of a new Monetary Policy Report, which superseded the previous flagship Inflation Report. The new report focuses on the context of the CNB Bank Board’s decision-making and the “main story” of the economy and the central bank’s forecast. The report also discloses parts of texts that were previously used only as an input for the Bank Board’s deliberations and were not published. The jury also praised the CNB’s decision to publish details about its new g3+ prediction model (link available in Czech only), the parameters of the model and the motivation for introducing it, which helped the economic community to understand the CNB’s actions in greater depth.

“Openness – or transparency, if you prefer – must go hand in hand with a high degree of independence, without which the Czech National Bank could not fulfil its statutory objectives. We are well aware of this at the CNB and incorporate it into our everyday decision-making. For us, transparency is not a one-off goal, but a never-ending process. Public understanding of our actions – especially in difficult and uncertain times such as the last two years – is, together with this award, proof for us that our efforts to be increasingly open to the public make sense,” said CNB Governor Jiří Rusnok.

The CNB has long been regarded as one of the world’s most transparent central banks. According to the latest Dincer-Eichengreen transparency index (external link), it is the second most transparent central bank in the world behind the Swedish Riksbank, ahead of the central banks of Chile, Norway, Hungary and the USA and the European Central Bank. The CNB will open up its headquarters on Na Příkopě street in Prague to schools and the public in May this year when it launches the CNB Visitor Centre (link available in Czech only). The Centre aims to present the central bank’s functions to the public in an engaging and interactive way and show how its work affects every one of us.

“For us, transparent and clear communication is the basic building block for explaining the central bank’s duties and the actions it must take in the individual phases of the Czech economic cycle. Striving to be easy to understand and to openly explain what the CNB does and why it does it has become a daily ‘routine’ for us in the best sense of the word,” said Markéta Fišerová, Director of the CNB Communications Division.

“The CNB’s commitment to transparency – including a longstanding focus to communicate with stakeholders in simple language via traditional and social media channels – is world-leading and appeared to help it to maintain public trust when the central bank had to stand its ground against political interference during parliamentary elections late last year,” said Christopher Jeffery, Chairman of the Central Banking Awards Committee and Editor-in-chief of Central Banking.

The Central Banking Awards (external link) were created in 2014 with the intention of recognising outstanding achievements and success in the central banking community. This is the second time the CNB has won the Central Banking Transparency Award. It did so for the first time in 2015.

CNB Communications Division