The participation of central banks in the fight against climate change has recently been advanced in several academic articles and policy papers. Since the emerging consensus is that climate change poses financial risks, the envisaged green central banking has a responsibility to address environmental sustainability as a means of promoting financial stability—an increasingly accepted goal of central banks in the post-financial crisis world. Thus far, the pro side of the argument is well represented in the literature, though often the benefits remain implicit: with the help of central banks via monetary and macroprudential policies, a smooth transition to a low-carbon economy would be somehow beneficial to all of us. With this article, we aim to add to this literature by looking at the costs and trade-offs of this course of action in light of the observation that the con side of the proposal has been only marginally addressed. We put forward a framework for the analysis of the costs and trade-offs of green central banking and exemplify the applicability of this framework by studying three cases of central banks for which the transition to green operation has been advanced. We find evidence that if costs and trade-offs are taken into account, the case in favor of greening central banks becomes less straightforward than is currently conveyed in the literature.

Given Romania’s relatively poor performance from a financial literacy perspective, many public and private entities are currently implementing various initiatives to address this problem. Assuming that financial education projects are a source of insights into broader societal issues, we analyze a sample of financial education projects to discern the issues of societal transformation reflected in their contents. We collected data from financial education websites and analyzed them through qualitative content analysis. We identify and discuss several manifest and latent themes and note the absence of others commonly found in the literature. The emphasis in the manifest themes falls on offering calibrated advice to a public with a relatively low level of financial literacy, prone to unhealthy behaviors such as consumerism, impulse buying, and indebtedness. Several latent concerns concentrate on the changing economic and social landscape, the fear that some traits of national character may hinder the individual appetite for adaptation, and the threat of an economic crisis. The needs of vulnerable groups are rarely addressed, while topics such as the ethical dimension of consumption, environmental and sustainability issues, and gender stereotypes are lacking. We thus find that the financial education initiatives in Romania address an underdeveloped range of topics.

Suggested only a few years ago, green central banking has received a new impetus with the central bank interventions implemented in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several central banks, with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) being prominent examples, have stepped up their public communication on this issue in an effort to explain and justify their planned or ongoing policy actions. Carefully recorded and easy to find, these public communication messages are a rich source of insight into the process of monetary policy formation. In this article, we analyze the messages from two central banks, with the primary objective of identifying the narratives they use (if any) and describing the key features of these narratives, thus shedding new light on an ongoing process of policy change. A secondary objective of the article is to contribute to the growing literature related to the use of narratives in public policy by studying narratives in monetary policy through qualitative means, an approach that, to date, has received relatively little attention from scholars. To this end, we discuss two expectations related to the use of policy narratives derived from the literature. Thus, we hope to show how the two central banks devise and deploy narratives to help implement an unprecedented turnaround in monetary policy.

The multifaceted interplay of economic and political factors in the process of euro adoption suggests the opportunity to take a political economy perspective on this complex issue. In this sense, a number of key political-economy related issues can be distilled in relation to the process of euro adoption, which will structure the following analysis. What are the key national winners and losers of this possible event? What role has interest groups pressure played in this process? Under what circumstances may bureaucracies such as the central bank body of experts act as a deterrent for the political end that is the single currency adoption? How are internationally exposed companies expected to behave and to promote their interests in relation to this event? What is the relative importance of the internal politics dynamic for euro adoption? We rely on process tracing to approach these questions for the Romanian case. Policy documents, newspaper articles, academic articles, economic indicators, and elite interviews are used to create an analytical narrative based both on a one-point-in-time description of the situation and on a timeline that lists the sequence of some relevant events. We argue that a specific combination of economic and political factors led to the failed euro adoption in Romania.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the revealed resistance to fiscal stability institutions recently showed by Romanian politicians. Establishing the context, the design of the present-day institutional environment for fiscal stability is investigated, with special attention being paid to its legal protection against political pressure. Typical opinions recently expressed by key political actors on certain issues related to fiscal stability are analyzed and categorized into a number of main arguments. To this end, insights from the political discourse analysis field are employed as tools for decoding the political meaning of written and spoken text. The public debates around the 2015-2016 tax cut program are presented as a case study for the investigation of political resistance to settled fiscal stability institutions. Keywords: fiscal stability; fiscal governance; political discourse analysis; Romania