To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to his answer of 18 June, Official Report, column 233, on the correlation between central bank independence and inflation, if he will list the studies which his Department has evaluated. [6872]

The Treasury has evaluated a number of studies on the relationship between central bank independence and inflation. A recent study by Eiffinger and De Haan (1996), "The Political Economy of Central Bank Independence", Special Papers in International Economics, Princeton University, identified twenty separate studies, all but two of which concluded that central bank independence is associated with lower inflation.