Latin American Central Banks Governance: Exploring Trade‐Offs, Conflicts of Interest, Performance, and Board Members' Characteristics

ABSTRACT This article examines the governance of Latin American central banks, focusing on trade‐offs arising from multiple mandates, governance design, and central bank board characteristics. The analysis combines a qualitative review of central bank statutes with an original panel dataset covering eight Latin American central banks over the period 2004–2023. Using fixed‐effects panel regressions, the study explores how governance arrangements and board composition are associated with inflation outcomes, the inflation target level, and the inflation target interval. The results indicate that governance design is primarily associated with differences in the structure of inflation‐targeting frameworks rather than with inflation levels. Higher levels of central bank independence are consistently associated with narrower inflation target intervals, which may reflect tighter control over short‐run inflation deviations. Board member characteristics display selective associations: political affiliation and board heterogeneity are linked to inflation outcomes in some specifications, while academic qualifications, gender composition, and professional background are more closely related to the calibration of inflation‐targeting instruments, particularly the inflation target interval. These associations are stronger for continuous measures of policy design than for binary indicators of inflation target achievement, which are more closely related to macroeconomic conditions and inflation persistence. Overall, the findings suggest that central bank governance in Latin America operates mainly through institutional design and policy calibration rather than through immediate adjustments in inflation outcomes.